Lou,
I'm going on vacation soon and need a mass storage solution. I
shoot RAW and have two 512 MB compact flash cards. That only gives
me about 100-120 shots.
I don't have and don't want to buy a laptop. I'm just curious what
people have used to store their images while away on vacation.
We just returned from a 10-day shipboard vacation.
We actually had two storage facilities along, our Dell laptop and an Aplux Tripper portable storage unit. The Tripper is equipped with a 40 GB hard drive. (We bought the Tripper carcass and the HD separately.)
The Tripper basically has the following modes when operated self-contained:
-Copy entire contents of the CF card to the HDD in a directory created for the event (preserving the folder structure)
-Move entire contents of the CF card to the HDD in a directory created for the event (preserving the folder structure)
-Copy entire contents of one of those directories on the HDD onto the CF card.
-Delete everything from the CF card
There is no opportunity (with only the Tripper itself) to examine what is on the Tripper HD at any level lower than the folders that are created to accommodate the entire contents of a CF card.
There is no ability (with the Tripper itself) to deal with individual files nor individual folders on the CF card, nor even to examine what is on the CF card.
When the unit is connected to a PC with a USB cable, both the HD in the unit and the CF card in the slot appear as separate drives to the computer's operating system. Both can be accessed and utilized just like any drives.
Our usage was actually this. At the end of each day's shooting, we would load the files to the laptop's HDD (usually using the CF reader in the Tripper, although we also had along a separate USB CF reader).
Then we would copy the day's new files from the laptop HDD onto the Tripper HDD, using the same directory structure on the Tripper HDD as we use in the laptop (and the desktop at home) for files from our digital cameras. (The Tripperis in effect the backup facility for the laptop.)
Once we confirmed that a group of files was safely recorded on both the laptop HDD and the Tripper HDD, we would delete them from the CF card. (This essentially parallels what we do at home, where we automatically backup files each night from the computer HDD onto a DVD and then clear them off then CF card the next morning.)
Best regards,
Doug
For them the CD devices seem better.
