Mobile backup solutions?

One of the specs of a HDD is the maximum altitudes for reliable use, and transport, around 35000ft for transport I think.

If carried in hand luggage, any HDD is fine as the cabin pressure is equal to around 8000ft. It's also fine in the luggage hold if that is also pressurised, but you may not know if it is or not. Any airline that carries animals will almost certainly heat and pressurise their luggage hold.

We take a laptop on holiday, one each actually, so that we can download and view the pictures, keep putting one on EPZ every day and keep in touch here as well.

For storage IMHO it would be best just to keep the SD cards safe and have plenty of them. All storage devices can fail and lose everything, but probably the cards least of all. They are the safest bet overall, and the cheapest option too.

About the same as losing a film except you'd lose more images. I've never lost a film. Anybody else ever lost one (other than in the post)?

Which is another idea, post your used cards back home. Hmmm, maybe not.

Equally well, what happens if someone steals your memory device/netbook/laptop, all of which are more attractive targets than am SD card.

When thinking a bit more about it, the heads use a cushion of air to keep enough distance of the plates so simply transporting them shouldn't be a problem regardless the altitude or air density.

About the aircraft, the cargo hold is pressurized.
The air gets pumped from the front of the pax compartment to the back and there are vent valves/holes on the side of the floor. When having a leak or such those can literary blow wide open so that the air pressure above the floor is the same as under it.

True but they certainly aren't the cheapest option when looking at the price per GB, certainly not with the high end cards.

What would you think of such device link


A quick search says that they are €299,- so around £255,- without a hard disk. Netbooks are close to the price but it's not that easy to swap disk but you can use external drives of course.
Todays 2.5" 500GB harddisks are €75 (£65) making them €0,15 (£0,13) per GB, you can't beat that with SD cards.
Since you can swap harddisks that means you can first save the SD card on one and then on another harddisk so that you always have a backup.

Of course it depends on how many photos you make what is cheaper but with holidays I found myself shooting around 4gb a day in raw... might be better to switch to JPG with the holidays but then again RAW can give you better results...

[quote="Mannesty"]About the same as losing a film except you'd lose more images. I've never lost a film. Anybody else ever lost one (other than in the post)?[/quote] Which is my point. Just having multiple Memory cards isn't backing up, copying the data to something else, and keeping the memory cards elswhere is.

Lose, damage or have stolen the Netbook (drive, etc), as long as you have the Memory cards, you've still got the pictures, or vice-versa.

And as it goes, yeh, I've lost a film the shots I took on top of Table Mountain, the 2nd to last roll I shot from my trip to Africa. That was a bugger!

My normal approach is to copy card images to the laptop, then burn them in large batches to a DVD-R. Until I've got them on the laptop HD and DVD, I don't remove them from the card.
They're in a couple of places then. I think a netbook and some cheap USB Flash sticks might be a more lightweight solution.
I've had 2 HD failures recently that have meant the loss of a few photos. On of those failures was in a month old Dell laptop...

Giles DVD+R is a better media then -R for long storage because of the way it burns the image and the algorithms it use, DVD+R is there for more resilient to scratch, has a better error correction and such.

You can still get a lot of information out of failed HD if the plater is still intact all information should still be there, so it might be worth to sent them to a specialist so that they can attempt to recover the data.

About failures, most devices fail in the first months of so in used when they survive that then most of them last till they wear down. It's there for better to get the equipment you want to take with you on your holiday in time and use it. Just to be sure you get a good device.

It's not transport, it's use at altitude. Above 10,000 feet or so the air is too thin to provide the cushion mentioned and the heads are likely to crash and destroy the disk and data on it. This is an issue in places like Tibet and on the altiplano in South America where you may be well over 10,000 feet.

Michael

Michael that is what I'm saying

Netbook is the way to go mine the Advent has built in mobile broadband so just plug in a sim card using the 3g I get 3 to 4 hours of life plus 160gig of HDD space for backup, perfect for me...

I just came back from holidays. On this trip I simply backed up my memory cards to hard drive and USB stick (I brought 24GB worth).

My plan was to not erase the SD cards until they were all full. That way I'd have three copies of everything. This never happened as it turned out. If I would have needed to erase the cards I would first have copied them to DVD-R.

You need at least two copies of every file, but I prefer three.

The image tank devices are way too expensive; I agree with those who vote netbook.