Data backup while travelling

Post update on 14.Aug.2016

My last article on this topic is more than 2 years old and in german only. So now is the right time to think about options.

Introduction

In the older german article i described how to save my images with the help of a laptop and external USB hard drives after previewing the images in Lightroom. This still is my prefered to handle my images when i’m travelling, mainly because the images are previewd and i can delete images that are not good enough to keep them in the catalog.

Too me the most important advantage is the fact, that on a laptop i can use [post id=949]Lightroom 6[/post] to import the images to a catalog and if there is time enough to set kewords and maybe to apply a GPS track log to the images.

The alternative

The solution if you’re searching for a compact and leight weight solution is your smartphone which should be with you anyway.

You only need an so called  OTG-cable and a small card reader . I used  a card reader which looks like a USB stick in this example, and even its very compact it reads the CF cards for my Canon  5D MK II and 7D cameras.

I used my [post id=1068]Samsung S6[/post] in this example but you could do it with a [post id=1146]tablet[/post] which consumes more room but has an external memory card to copy your files.

After connecting the card reader to the smartphone on odern Android versions the file manager opens, which can be used to copy the raw files from the card to the smartphones memory.

With the Samsung S6 i have to copy the raw files to the internal memory of the phone, but i got 20GB of free memory so this should be enough to save the images from one day 😉 If your smartphone allows the usage of a memory card you don’t have this limitation.

Copying is done pretty fast even though the Samsung S6 does not support USB 3.0.

What about data backup?

Now is the question about data backup, because saving your raw files to the internal memory of a smartphone ist very limited 😉

For this i’ll take a 2,5 inch external enclosure from Icy Box, but i don’t insert a regular hard disk but a SSD. The size is determined by your needs and your budget. But SSD with a size 256 GB are available for less than 100,– €.

I tried regular harddisks but either the are not recognized at all or at least not reliable. Anyway regular harddisks have mechanical componets to chances are good taking harm to the disk while transporting.

The cons

This alternative only saves the images to another storing devices but has one main disadvantage compared to my favorite method with a laptop.

It just stores the images without the possibilty to sort out images or do some basic processing.

Conclusion

The method to use a smartphone/tablet to store your images has been proved in practise, but the images can’t sorted. But in combination with a external SSD the required space is very small.

What do think about this solution? An option or do you prefer a notebook to store your images. Let me know in the comments or ask a question.

ciao tuxoche