I want to back up photos on a trek, and I am not confident that an external "hyperdrive" or whatever will do the trick, so I am thinking of buying a small netbook. Of course I'd prefer the new MacBook Air, but I'm not made of money :-((
It needs to be reliable and good battery life, and of course not too expensive. Any suggestions of what to buy and what to avoid?
What we did (although doesn't guarantee backing up everything) is to buy a set of memory cards and rotate them (ie get, say, four cards and use the first one on days 1, 5, 9 and the second one on days 2, 6, 10 etc) then if one fails you only lose a portion of the trip and you still have days around it.
We decided on that simply for space issues on our trip to Kenya.
They are better than your average netbook as they have an nVidia ION graphics chip. Good battery life, but perhaps a tad too big.
Are you sure you want to take a netbook on an expedition? (The Himalayan trip right?)
we took our cards into internet cafes/photo shops* as and when we passed them, and got our cards ripped to 2x CDROMs. Post one home, stick one in luggage.
as long as you arent trekking around Antarctica youd be surprised how prevalent they are in the world.
I got a Tosh NB 200 for xmas last year, its light, reasonably fast and the battery lasts for aaaaaages!
we took our cards into internet cafes/photo shops
Picassa/Google do loads of storage for peanuts per year.
Thinkpad X60 from Ebay
For:
cheap
v good quality
nice and small
good battery life
Against:
2nd hand
not as fast as current laptops
Are you sure you want to take a netbook on an expedition? (The Himalayan trip right?)
Yes - Himalayan trip, so I don't want to lose photos from having insufficient cards!! Not sure if netbook is the best solution, but I can't think of a better one right now. Alternative is a shed load of cards!!
Portable drives are very good - why the lack of confidence? I used a Jobo Giga One on a recent trip to SA. It's tiny, costs comparitively very little, internal, rechargeable battery lasts months and so far it's behaved perfectly.
Quite sure more modern devices are even more stable / reliable. If I was buying another, I'd get one with a wee screen, so I could see the uploaded pics.
Yeah good point - get an online storage account and upload everything to there.
Picassa/Google do loads of storage for peanuts per year
bandwidth is still limited in some places, but internet cafes with CDROM burners are relatively common.
How high are you going? Altitude and hard disk drives dont mix well.
bandwidth is still limited in some places, but internet cafes with CDROM burners are relatively common.
One with a solid state hard drive? Limited space but much more robust.
iPod?
Theres an adapter that allows you to connect your camera to your ipod and the pics get uploaded.
When 16gb memory cards are so cheap I would stick with a pile of SDHC cards. If I must then I would take a small 320gb USB powered drive.
Portable drives are very good - why the lack of confidence?
Probably just paranoid, but I don't like not being able to check that it worked OK, and that I didn't make a silly mistake. And now they are as expensive as a small computer!
removable media is pretty robust.
they got enough of the sea soaked SD cards to get the in crossing footage of Andrew McAuley's failed (awesome committment) kayak across the tasman sea
Don't SD cards use the same technology as black box recorders on planes? Or is that flash cards? Or are they the same anyway?
iPad + camera connection kit + usb drive.
iPad + camera connection kit + usb drive.
= expensive solution vs a handful of good quality 8GB SD cards
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