After a long time with work and vacations at home, is now soon again vacation time. The ideal time to travel more and discover new places. For me, that includes taking my dusty photography equipment with me. However, it’s not quite like it used to be. The days are gone when I carried a bag full of slide films across South America. Hence also the challenges changed. I no longer have to worry about my films being inspected by hand. In return, I now have to take care of a pile of data. And finally, backup & recovery is one of the many topics that keep me busy in my work.

The Problem

With modern digital cameras and high resolutions, a few GB of data can be generated very quickly. Depending on the model, this can be several MB or even up to 100MB per image in RAW format. How to become a master of this data flood? What options do I have?

• Amount of Images: The first thing you should do is to take pictures consciously and not just snap them. 🙄
• Storage Options:
  • Take enough SD cards with you…
  • Take large enough SD Cards with you…
  • Backup SD cards to use them several times…

So just take a huge amount of SD cards with me I do not want. On the one hand, it goes into the money, on the other hand, such a SD card can also break. Losing a 128GB SD Card with half the pictures of you trip is not funny. So what remains is the regular backup. Maybe you might think, no problem, you can do it on your notebook. Nope. I do work in IT as a consultant and carry 1-2 notebooks around with me all year. So the first thing I don’t take on vacation is the notebook.

A few Ideas

So what options remain to backup data on a 6 week long trip?

• Option 1: Upload the pictures on a regular basis to a cloud storage e.g. Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud or you private NAS with remote access. But here you need a camera or another device with which you can upload the data via internet. But what about the network speed? Roaming? With 200-300GB you will surely get desperate.
• Option 2: Come on, just take your laptop with you…
• Option 3: Copy you pictures to you tablet or phone. Mmh yes, but who has 500 GB of free space?
• Option 4: Use one of these nice HDD / SSD with a built-in SD card reader. For example:
  • LaCie Rugged BOSS SSD with SD card reader, battery etc. this allows on the file copies of you SD cards. Actually a cool solution just a bit expensive.
  • LaCie Rugged RAID Pro with 4TB and a SD card reader. Unfortunately this one requires a device to copy the data. When using with a tablet you also have to power the HDD with a power supply.
  • WD My Passport wireless to copy the data onto.
  • Build you own Rugged BOSS with a Raspberry Pi
• Option 5: A regular HDD / SSD and a SD card reader with a tablet or phone

Which option would you prefer? I first though about Option 4 and to buy a LaCie Rugged BOSS SSD. But then this was too proprietary and too expensive for me. So I decided to go with option 5. Especially since I already have most of the components.

The Solution

My photo gear packing list will be completed for the trip as follows:

• Apple iPad Pro. Could also by an iPhone or any other tablet / phone. It either requires an USB-C port or a different hub.
• Satechi 6in1 Hub / Dock with a SD card reader, USB port and the corresponding cable for the iPad. Could also be any other hub.
• Sandisk Extreme Pro Portable: I do use a 2TB model with Apple APFS and encryption. The lates iOS devices can also read APFS. This way I can keep my disk secure.
• USB-C cable for the SSD
• SD cards for the camera

Yeah but how you do the backup now? I do plug all together. As the iPad can handle external storage devices, you will be able to read / access the SD Card as well the SSD. You can either user the File App or any other App which handles files. In the following picture you see the File App with the SSD (traveler) and the SD card (Leica M). To get access to the SSD with APFS and encryption, I only had to enter the password to unlock.

Within the File App you then can copy individual each picture or the whole content of the SD card. If you enjoy moving folders or individual images with your finger, it is quite ok. It gets complicated if you do not delete the SD card again and again and thus copy the existing images again. To make this a bit faster, rsync would not be bad. However, this is not available on the iPad. But there is an App called Sync Folder Pro. With this app you can define simple tasks to synchronise two directories e.g. SD Card with SSD.

In my case I just did create a task for the two folder with the sync mode A+>B. This does update the backup folder with the new content of the SD card.

My workflow now looks like this:

1. Put everything together
2. Unlock encrypted SSD
3. Start sync job to update the backup on SSD with the latest photos from any of my SD cards
4. Optional start to review a few pictures using the File App and/or importing some of them into Lightroom on iPad

Conclusion

So the tests at home on the desk were successful. What is still missing is the real use in the coming summer vacations. But I am confident that this will work out well. In the event that I do have fast wifi, I will of course back up data to my NAS via wifi. To be on the safe side, I’ll take my analog Leica M6 with a few films. It has already passed its toughest test. In addition, I know that with this camera can definitely take home a few pictures. The problem is then rather to develop the films at home….