Spec me a device for a drive to Africa...

[Tobes]

So this is a post on behalf of my Dad who is doing the Dakar challenge. So something about driving from UK to Africa for charity.

He has set up a couple of cameras for video of the trek only it's a long trek so it's going to use a fair bit of space on the SD Card. He's after a device that will rip a SD card over to a external HDD. He also has a Samsung S3 phone which takes SD Cards.

So he's looking around for a device and has found the Corsair Voyager Air 1 TB Wireless Hard Drive.

I think it retails in the UK for about £150. Seems like quite a handy device. Just wanted to know if anyone could think of a better way to transfer files. This way I assume he would take the card out of the camera and put it in his phone then wirelessly transfer it over.

 

[Mr Plow]

You can buy dedicated photo storage devices that will allow you to copy the contents of the SD card directly to an inbuilt hard drive, a little pricey but less hassle then the above solution. If you search google for 'memory card backup' the first link should take you to one such device.

 

[SimonC]

Can't help, but good luck to your dad, hope all goes well.
Would love to do something like that.

 

[PoliticallyCorrect]

If you don't mind roaming charges and not having a continuous 3G signal the whole way you could shoot video on a phone and upload it to the cloud as when the 3G signal comes and goes.

For most devices, dropbox would work. And for the iPhone you can create a shared photo stream in iCloud and each time you upload a clip to it, just remove the clip from the camera roll of the Phone. Multiple phones can upload to the same shared photo stream or same dropbox folder.

Imagine keeping any smartphone charged up the whole time though, would need some sort of continuous USB power.

 

[Tobes]

They are fine for power as they have rigged up the car with USB sockets as the camera will run off from them. However they were looking at prices for 3G sims etc and it isn't cheap and it's a lot of hassle. Plus it's not really reliable. If they can't get a signal then the footage has to be lost as they can't transfer it. Hardware is the way to go here.

I think he's going to go ahead and order the Corsair as it has versatilely at home once the trip is done.

 

[marms]

Has he considered a cheap netbook? It would let him check the videos as he saves them to it and could also play music or watch videos on it.