Digital Camera backup memory storage (1 Viewer)

James Eaton · Oct 31, 2004

Hi All,

I'm finally looking into switching to a digital SLR this week, having spent the last 8 years on slide film, a big switch for me, it's terrifying me! So much to look into, but as luck would have it I'm hopefully having a Canon 20D brought over from the states by a friend for me, so its all a bit sudden.

My main query is this - As I use my camera in remote rainforests, where I could be up to 2 weeks away from eletricity obviously battery life and memory usage is important to me. Could anyone tell me just how long the rechargable batteries last on these cameras? I use a 100-400m IS lens too, so this may effect the battery life? Will I need several spare batteries and are they expensive? As I'm guessing they are not included in the price of the camera body.

Also for memory storage I'll be buying 4-5 1GB memory cards, though I'll need much more space overall (As I could be away for up to 8 months at a time), what is the most compact and convinent (and cheapest!) way to store all the extra pictures? Is it best buying some sort of small external hard drive/PDA or Laptop? I'm against just continually saving onto CD, just in case anything happens to them.

Thanks for any advice that comes my way, either on here or via a personal email,

All the best

KC Foggin · Nov 1, 2004

Hey James, you might want to take a look at Nigel Blake's thread which is currently running as well. He should be able to answer any questions you don't find in that thread.
I've posted the link here.

http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=23368

Tannin · Nov 1, 2004

Five 1GB flashcards might not last you very long. You'll soon find that with each shot costing approximately $0.00 you start taking lots more than you used to. (Yes, even with your long-ingrained film-camera user habits.) My method is simple. I take my laptop, plenty of blank CDs, and a half-dozen pre-stanped postbags. Every day, I follow the same routine.

1: Load pictures from the flashcards onto the laptop. (Copy them, don't move them. If your digital camera comes with one of those poxy and useless automatic viewing and copying programs #8212; as, I think, all cameras do these days — uninstall or disable it so that you are in contrl, not the computer.)
2: Make tea. Admire pictures. Delight in the good ones. Sigh over the ones that got away. Don't change anything yet! Don't even delete obvious duds.
3: Burn the whole lot to CD.
4: Now you can make changes. Sort out the best ones, delete the duds. If you screw up, you have two fair copies: one on the flash cards, one on your CD-ROM.
5: Eat. Drink more tea. Sleep.
6: Breakfast
7: Format flash cards.
8: Take more pictures.

Depending on where you are camped and what delightful feathered visitors you think you might have in the morning, you might want to format the flash cards and look over your gear last thing in the evening instead of in the morning. But never before you have got two fair copies of the day's shots.

Every few days, you drop a handful of CDs into one of your pre-stamped postbags and send them to your nearest and dearest so that in case of complete disaster (let's say your car is stolen, complete with camera, flash cards, and laptop computer) at least you still have the pictures. You can buy another camera. You can beg, borrow, or steal another laptop. But you can't ever buy the pictures back!

Now that's well-suited to someone like me who travels by car. What if you don't have a car? It gets harder.

One thing you might consider if you are seriously space constrained and don't have room for even a laptop, is a stand-alone hard drive with flash card interface. I've seen them advertised at fairly reasonable prices. Nothing like as useful as a laptop, but very handy just the same. And quite a lot smaller, of course.

James Eaton · Nov 1, 2004

Hi Tannin,

Thanks for all this, I've been doing a lot of reading up last night, so I'm a bit more clued up now, yes, the stand alone hard drives sounds great for me, I can get 60-120GB storage for under 200 pounds, certainly a winner in my book!

I can then do all this every other evening or so to save them, but I wouldn't be able to save them to CD, annoying, so a small laptop is still a possiblity because of this.
Though every time I go to a city with internet cafes I could burn them on to CD's then, a slightly bigger risk, but a bit cheapr for me, money is a bit of a big object sadly for me at the moment. And no, they'll be no car! Just lots of batteries.

I also which my day involved that much food and Tea! Some places I will be visiting will hopefully involve some plain (similar to rich tea) biscuits, cold boiled rice and some iodine treated river water!

Thanks for all your useful help,

All the best

James · Nov 1, 2004

Love your sensible advice Tannin. Especially the drinking tea bit. It clarifies the mind BEFORE you delete anything!

James

Ghostly Vision · Nov 1, 2004

1: Load pictures from the flashcards onto the laptop. (Copy them, don't move them. If your digital camera comes with one of those poxy and useless automatic viewing and copying programs #8212; as, I think, all cameras do these days — uninstall or disable it so that you are in contrl, not the computer.)

Hi Tannin

When you say copy them don't move them, do you mean burn to CD rather than move to the PC hard-drive?

Why might this cause a problem? When I bring photos home, I tend to "copy" (move) them onto my PC and then edit them. Am I best not to do this?

Regards

Sean

Rob Hutchinson · Nov 1, 2004

Ghostly Vision said:
1: Load pictures from the flashcards onto the laptop. (Copy them, don't move them. If your digital camera comes with one of those poxy and useless automatic viewing and copying programs #8212; as, I think, all cameras do these days — uninstall or disable it so that you are in contrl, not the computer.)

Hi Tannin

When you say copy them don't move them, do you mean burn to CD rather than move to the PC hard-drive?

Why might this cause a problem? When I bring photos home, I tend to "copy" (move) them onto my PC and then edit them. Am I best not to do this?

Regards

Sean

Sean,

I think Tannin is recommending that you keep the Pics stored on the memory card until you have burnt the to CD as a back up incase the pic are lost during burning or manipulation, the Coolpix's automatically copy rather than moving pic from the memory card but some other don't.
In your case best to burn the original pics onto CD before editting them.

atb

Rob

Ghostly Vision · Nov 1, 2004

Rob Hutchinson said:
Sean,

I think Tannin is recommending that you keep the Pics stored on the memory card until you have burnt the to CD as a back up incase the pic are lost during burning or manipulation, the Coolpix's automatically copy rather than moving pic from the memory card but some other don't.
In your case best to burn the original pics onto CD before editting them.

Thanks Rob

So just to clarify and get it clear in my head:

The Coolpix does the right thing and copies, not moves the photos?
I am ok to transfer them straight to my PC hard-drive without loss of quality - the only risk being losing the photos should the pc crash or get stolen etc?

Cheers

Sean

dacol · Nov 1, 2004

The advice from Tannin was very sensible, I would add only that besides the portable hard-drives there are also portable CD recorders. Typically they have a port to read the CF cards (sometimes other cards too, and there are card adapters that will have an input port for whatever card you have and an output usually like a CF card that allows you to use any card with a CF card reader). These portable CD recorders are comparable in price to the portable hard-drives. In the US they go from $300 to $500 US usually. Some models also have video output allowing you to see your picture in amonitor or TV screen if you have access to one.

Dalcio

CJW · Nov 1, 2004

We use a Flashtrax with a 40GB memory. It's brilliant.
Warehouse Express sell them, see the link at the top of this page.

christineredgate · Nov 1, 2004

At the moment I am using the Apacer to put the images on a cd before loading onto the pc.The only reason is because our pc seems to have a problem with card readers.I use one for a couple of months,then up comes a sign saying "New hardware found,please install"I have to keep paying a guy to find these card readers remove and re install,so bought this Apacer Steno as a back up.Bit pricey,I'm afraid,but it does the job,and can be used by battery only.So it is a fully portable item which one could take on holiday breaks etc.

James Eaton · Nov 2, 2004

These portable hard drives sound excellent, just what I'm looking for really. Though has anybody had any troubles with them at all? Is it easy to accidently delete the hard drive?

How does the power supply work, am I just being dumb, or can you switch the power off and the images will still be held? I just want to make sure before I buy, as I will hold the images on the hard drive for up to 8 months, but also copying them onto CD whenever I can, though still keeping them on the hard drive for this time, so I have 2 copies, just in case!

Thanks for your help,

Edward woodwood · Nov 2, 2004

James

you thought about an mp3 player/portable disk?

you can get em in 20, 40 or 80 GB and they will hold loads of bird calls....many more than you could ever need and will also take photos too....

plus they are tiny and lightweight - bit like a walkman really. Some also have an external mike for recording birdsong for playback when connected to a small speaker.

I use one (20GB) mainly for music (holds thousands of tracks) but will hopefullyuse it in future for photos/bird calls

keep working the pits
Tim

dacol · Nov 2, 2004

Tim Allwood said:
James

you thought about an mp3 player/portable disk?

you can get em in 20, 40 or 80 GB and they will hold loads of bird calls....many more than you could ever need and will also take photos too....

plus they are tiny and lightweight - bit like a walkman really. Some also have an external mike for recording birdsong for playback when connected to a small speaker.

I use one (20GB) mainly for music (holds thousands of tracks) but will hopefullyuse it in future for photos/bird calls

keep working the pits
Tim

I have done that. I used a Archos Gmini 120 in a recent trip to Brazil. This unit is about the size of a cigarette pack with a 20GB drive and an internal microphone that turned out to be quite good. It also accepts an external microphone but I haven't yet tried that as one needs to get a pre-amplifier to make decent recordings with an external microphone. I used a small (about the same size as the Gmini) loudspeaker from Radio Shack for playbacks. I put several CDs of bird calls in the Gmini and also used it to keep the sound recordings I made and the photos that I took. The Gmini comes with a Cf card port and I used a card adapter (xD to CF) in order to download my photos into the Gmini. Evrything worked as Archos stated it would, very easy to use. My major concern was that I would drop the Gmini while using it as a field sound recorder. Also I didn't know how it would react to a high humidity climate but it seemed to have done well. Nonetheless I am planning on getting a portable CD recorder so that I can have the photos in what I perceive as a more robust medium.

Dalcio

Edward woodwood · Nov 2, 2004

cheers Dalcio

I too have the Archos Gmini 120

relieved to hear it works fine in the field

atb
Tim

grasland · Nov 13, 2004

The latest generation "Hi-Md"Sony Minidisc Recorders are compatible with Hi-Md discs which have a capacity of 1 Gb (less than 10 euro's over here). And there's an (CF-)cardreader availlable for them. So you can backup (or double backup) your pictures on minidiscs. This has some advantages compared to a (portable) hard-disk backup:
- with a harddisk you can run out of capacity - buy more minidiscs
- a harddisk can crash, maybe all data lost - only one minidisc lost

I wonder, has anyone in here tried minidiscs for this purpose yet?

grasland · Dec 2, 2004

To answer my own question: yes it works fine. I purchased a minidiscrecorder and the cardreader and did some testing at home. Soon I'll be testing in Southern Africa. Let's hope that works out fine too.
|=)|

Alastair Rae · Dec 2, 2004

grasland said:
To answer my own question: yes it works fine. I purchased a minidiscrecorder and the cardreader and did some testing at home. Soon I'll be testing in Southern Africa. Let's hope that works out fine too.
|=)|

Peter,
What equipment are you using exactly?

grasland · Dec 6, 2004

Hi Alastair,
I am using a Sony HIMD minidisc recorder (the 700, but any HiMD-recorder will do) in combination with the Sony Memory Card Reader MCMD-R1 (specifications) . The card-reader supports these card-formats: Memory Stick®, Memory Stick PRO™, Memory Stick Duo™1and Memory Stick PRO Duo™1, xD Picture Card™, Compact Flash®, Smart Media, SD™ Memory Card, mini SD™ Memory Card2, Multi Media Card.
I tested it with Compact Flash but will be testing it with SD this week. It copies the complete content of the card to a numbered directory on the 1 GIG minidisc. Everytime you copy to the minidisc, a new numbered directory is created. So there's no chance of overwriting pictures which have the same filenames.
There are two buttons on the card reader: copy and check. Copy starts copying content to the minidisc. Afterwards you can check wether the copying was done succesfully. A blinking led gives status information by blinking in different ways.
The only disadvantage so far is that I have not yet found a way to "browse" to the pictures on the minidisc in the minidiscrecorder. The Minidiscrecorder only supports browsing throug audio-files which are in the sony-only Atrac-format. So you need to have some trust in Sony....Connected to the pc the minidisc is browsable. In windows explorer it appears as a removable disk.
The biggest advantage for me is that a real backup is possible. It's easy to copy the pictures to two minidiscs which then can be stored in two backpacks.

Regards,

Peter Weiland

Robert L Jarvis · Dec 10, 2004

I have something similar to that owned by Tim. It is the Smartdisk Flash Trax and can store Photos, audio or mpeg. It has a capacity of 20 gb and for downloading to the computer it is USB 2 ready. It is 5.5in x 3.5in x 1.25in and has a 3.5 diagonal LCD display. You just plug in the memory card and download to the storage folder created on the hard drive. Essentially that is exactly what the device is and can be used as an external hard drive on the computer. The rechargeable battery lasts for about 3 weeks depending on useage.

Robert

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