SD card backup?

I take just one SD card with me, use it all holiday, after which it is usually less than half full, then transfer it to NAS storage when I get home. If I have a tablet or something with me on hols - which I usually don't) I would probably transfer images to it at night as a backup (not because I'd be worried about the SD card failing but in case the camera gets stolen the next day.

This is not the approach I advocate if you have a fake card off ebay but with a good quality SD card I think the changes of failure are considerably less than me not getting back home at all because the plane has crashed - and I don't worry about that either .

However I do make a point of only ever writing to or formatting the card on the camera that is going to use it and never on the PC, in fact it only ever gets mounted read only on the PC. And I avoid selectively deleting and faffing around with images on the card as well, and reformat it completely from time to time. It should last several lifetimes before it wears out I think - I have a server at work with an internal SD card that isn't anywhere near as good as the one in my camera, gets as many writes in a day as the camera does in three months and even then is still unconditionally warranted for five years.

Unless the value of your images is extremely high the reliability of good quality SD cards is sufficient that failure doesn't need to be a worry. The biggest risk is likely to be losing the SD card itself - which is one reason I don't like to have a pocket full of them and stick to the one in the camera.

Really? A single card? How big a card do you take with you? How long do you go away for?

The fact that I can lose one is why I back everything up every evening. The reason I take several with me, and try to have a formatted one in my pocket, along with a spare battery, is just in case the in camera card fails.

Besides, depending on where I am, and what I want to photograph of course, I can fill a card in a day.

On the subject of backups - if you have a good uncapped Internet connection then Zools (Amazon Cold Storage reseller) is a reasonably priced option. Unlimited (well, actually only 16 Exabytes) cloud storage space for £2-£1.40 per month. It can take a while though to shuffle all your files over though.

Surprisingly, checking Alibaba, no-one seems to make a little cheap USB powered SD card copier. A business opportunity for someone - I'd buy one.

Hi
What about one of these
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ex-Pro®-Picture-Drive-EX205K-Storage/dp/B005R173DO

For security in hotels for my gear I use various Pacsafe products.

I find an 8G card is sufficient for me when on a fortnight's holiday. That said last week I changed card to take advantage of the 90MBs write speeds now available at reasonable cost, and the new card is 32G.

I use a tablet (Microsoft surface)when I'm away from home, and transfer directly from the camera via USB to that- do a basic sort - and then copy to a Seagate 1TB backup drive, which is only slightly bigger than a reasonably sized smart phone.

Each to her, and his, own.

Rob.

Do you format the SD card in the computer after transferring files or in the camera after replacing it. ?

Always in the camera. Formatting in the computer is *probably* going to give the same result but introduces extra opportunities for things to go wrong.

Note that it isn't necessary (or desirable) to format the card every time, just deleting all the images in camera is better. Do try to not fill the card up completely and reformat it occasionally, every 10 uses or whenever you have had to fill the card over 95% or so should keep it nice and healthy. Substitute any number between 1 and 50 for my suggested '10' and you should still be fine, it really isn't critical.

A fragmented Hard drive slows things down because of the physical travel of access to the files. For solid state memory like SD Cards a fragmentation isn't an issue unless you want to repartition the device

So no it's not the same as not defragmenting a hard drive. Deleting all the images doesn't affect the file system ( file structure) which stays the same regardless of how many files are stored or how fragmented they are

That doesn't make any sense. I think you meant to say 'the card gets cluttered with odd bits of old files'. Well when you delete all files no it doesn't. All sectors not marked as bad are available to be written to.




It's pointless, but if it makes you feel better.

Neither.


For formatting for first use when buying a new card then it doesn't matter whether you format in the camera or the computer, whatever is more convenient. I usually stick in the camera and formatted it, simply as it's easier than plugging in my card reader to the computer


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I would be interested to know from where you get the information that it doesn't matter. The camera manufacturers say it does matter. It's no big deal to believe them is it?

I think it makes more sense to format a card in the camera in which you intend to use it. Having said that it's been suggested its not wise to swap cards from different camera makes but I've done exactly that (Pentax DSLR - Panasonic compact) and it's worked fine. I also sometimes wonder about so called card failure. Is it the card that's failed or is it a problem with dodgy card readers or even the computer itself? Several times where I worked staff had floppy discs "fail" only for me to be able to retrieve the data using a computer with a different operating system. They were using PC's and I managed to read the discs on a Mac.

Because the FAT32 file system is a worldwide standard. Just like a JPG file is.

If a camera manufacturer has it's own proprietary file system then yes of course it will matter, but Pentax certainly doesn't, as it uses the FAT32 File system for SD Cards. My Sony and Nokia cams also use the FAT32 file system.

The reason camera manufacturers say to format the card in the camera is to avoid technically naive people formatting the card elsewhere with a file structure that isn't compatible such as any of the others listed here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems


As long as you format with FAT32 then it makes absolutely no difference what device you format the card with

It will work fine. They use the same File system


The problem is the Internet is full of technically naive people parroting and perpetuating myths like "always format instead of deleting all images", or "always format in the camera", and then spouting technically naive and erroneous reasons for doing so.


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