Sd card issues

Afternoon,
I've posted a lot recently, and now I have another reason to post and this time it's another issue I have.
I have found that using an SD card in the laptops memory card slot is awesome. It gives me an opportunity for removable storage, and in some ways, unlimited storage, as when one memory card gets full I can simply take that one out and put a new one in.
However, I seem to be losing files I have stored on these cards. At some point over the weekend I moved a few zip files onto a memory card, ejected the memory card - in the correct way - put it back in my laptop bag, and then inserted it again yesterday to pull a zip off the card. Internal storage isn't an issue for me it's just I like to keep a good portion of my hard drive empty. It's not the first time this has happened, a few different cards have lost data and have done since I've had my laptop, but now it's starting to bug me. At at first I thought it may be the adapter so I've tried multiple of these too.
I had a search around the internet for good data recovery software, found one called "iCarePro", but this only allowed me to recover 1gb for free, and the final 4gb I wanted to recover was only available after paying for a premium service.
So my questions are these. What is causing me to lose data off SD cards, and how can I stop it? Also, what is a good data recovery program that doesn't limit the amount it will recover unless you pay?
I think I've posted 4 or 5 different things over the past 3 days, my problem is that although I'm competent with a PC, I seem to be running into a thousand different issues that are not something I've had to deal with before.

 

This is the program I have used for a few years now the good news is it's free
it's called backupper.

It will backup your full system including your files and folders

The best way to backup is to backup to an external hard drive they are so cheap and the link cables can be cheap also and found on ebay.

Alternatively you could make an other partition on your hard drive to place the backup on

Here's the link:
https://www.backup-utility.com/

I find flash drives are a lot better than sd cards I have also found some sd cards to be unreliable . One good make to go for is scandisk.

 

Something back,
Once again, thanks for the help. You've answered near enough everything I've wanted an answer to on here and your advice has always worked perfectly. I'll get on with downloading that now and I'll look into getting an external drive too, to be honest that's been something I've been looking at for a while now