SD card backup

Associate
Joined
16 Mar 2004
Posts
1,889
Location
Oxford
I'm off on holiday for a couple of weeks in January (I know a long way off :D). I'll be taking my Nikon DSLR and a 4k GoPro and will be taking lots of photos & videos. Whilst I'll be taking quite a few SD cards is there any device I could use to create a backup? Wi-Fi isn't really an option as it's a cruise and the cost of Wi-Fi is around £25 per day and by all accounts speed and latency are terrible.

It is possible to take a laptop and at the end of each day copy the days events onto it, but is there another option? - essentially what I'm looking for is a HDD & SD card reader/writer in one.

Edit; sorry, just reading through this it's not very clear, not knowing if such a device exists I can't really be any clearer. Looking on Google just comes up with various rugged drives/enclosures. Sounds hilarious when I read it back but a HDD with SD card slot that will just copy the contents of the SD card each day.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
9 Dec 2007
Posts
10,492
Location
Hants
You can get backup devices that transfer memory cards to their internal disk. However for the cost of them you may as well just double up on memory cards and swap out regularly to the cabin safe.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
16 Mar 2004
Posts
1,889
Location
Oxford
Thanks, I'll be getting a load of decent cards, by all accounts GoPro needs that anyway for 4k. My Nikon DSLR gets ~1.5k on 16GB. Not entirely sure on the GoPro, I haven't bought it yet...
 
Associate
OP
Joined
16 Mar 2004
Posts
1,889
Location
Oxford
I use an Asus Travelair N, its a little slow but works really well.

It might be considerably more than you need but a Gnarbox can do what you want (and more)

Thanks for all your help with this, I think I'll have to settle with the original bit of advice of getting a load of SD cards, I can always find a use for them after the holiday - quite often looking for one to set something up an a Raspberry Pi and have to borrow the one in my camera. I'm probably just being slightly paranoid about the life of an SD card!
 
Soldato
Joined
6 Jul 2008
Posts
4,962
Location
Brighton
Yeah sd cards last a long time, the only reason I got the Asus was on one of my holidays I had my camera and cards stolen, now I make sure each night of the holiday I back up my cards to the Asus and keep it in a different place, we lost some lovely memories when they were stolen.
 
Associate
Joined
21 Jan 2019
Posts
10
This is a very late reply and you have probably finished your cruise by now.

I used to use a laptop to backup photographs on holiday. Now I use the OTG facility on my Android phone. I plug the phone, my camera and a large USB stick into an USB hub and can then copy between the three devices.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
16 Mar 2004
Posts
1,889
Location
Oxford
Thanks for the reply. Yeah the holiday is now over and today it was that back to work time.

I just took a load of SD cards I could find and over the 14 days changed them every few days. The GoPro wasn't used that much, just on excursions in the sea, so for the 4K content I used a couple of the compatible Sandisk cards and just swapped them around. I decided against taking a laptop (although I nearly bought one at the airport!) as it would only ever be used briefly most days to copy pictures onto and the extra weight and space it would consume could be annoying.
 
Back
Top Bottom