Data backup on vacation with a cell phone

Data backup on vacation is sometimes not that easy if your’re urged to save devices and weight for flight trips.

But anyway you want your captures to be stored in a save place, even though you don’t caryy a laptop with you. Even though development is going towards cloud services more and more but for photo/video most of the times this isn’t a real alternative, because first you need a very good mobile connection and secondly most of the mobil data rates are limited to 5-10GB data transfer or are really expensive.

If you have enough cloud space at your disposal maybe a backup via Wifi is possible. But most of the free of charge Wifi options in hotels are not sufficent to backup images in a GB range. And even those hotels who charged additionally for the use of Wifi on the rooms sometimes weren’t any better. One exception from this rule was our last vacation where the hotel offered a free Wifi connection with almost 50MBit/s and even better the connection was a synchron connection, meaning the upload was not restricted to a frection of the regular speed. So this was the first time i uploaded all my images from this vacation, arround 30GB to my cloud storage space. And that included the tracklog-files from my GPS Logger.

All you need to do this is a smartphone or a tablet which offers OTG and of course you need a OTG cable for your device. You need an external card-reader for your memory cards from the camera and make sure you’ll test this card-reader while at home. I have a card reader for CF and SD cards from Lexar and an older one for many more formats, but this one didn’t work neither with the tablet or the cell phone.

My Huawei Mate 10 Pro offers 128 GB of RAM und would have been more than enough for a short vacation but i prefered to read the image to my tablet which offers an internal memory card. From there i made an additional backup to an external hard drive.

In addition to the cloud backup there were 2 additional copies from all images/videos available just in case 😉

An addtional alternative would be to use the cameras memory card until it is filled up. To make the dialy backup more comfortable i generated a new folder in the camera for every day.

This can be done with most of the cameras without any problems. Just the Lumix G81 only offers a setting to reset the image number to be used. But with this option a new folder is generated on the memory card.

This procedure doesn’t not assure to keep you away from formatting the memory card in the camera. So this wouldn’t be a backup, its just an additional copy.

But anyway it is not that hard to backup your images/videos with just a little bit of effort and weight even if you’re travelling.

ciao tuxoche