Travel file backup sugestions?

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Steve-T

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I am travelling to Finland with Finnair and I am taking the D800 and 500mm lens and this alone without the battery grip or any additional kit takes up my 8Kg hand luggage allowance.
I also wish to take at least on landscape lens, preferably 2.

I am going to have to put some stuff in the hold luggage, grip, ball head etc and stick the odd lens in a jacket pocket.

The problem I have is with file storage I have a few 32 and 16Gb cards but for wildlife this is not going to be enough storage and will cost too much to buy enough. Normally I would take a laptop or even buy a netbook and use a usb hard drive but it is unlikely I will not able to take a netbook on as a second piece of hand luggage.

I am considering a battery storage device, but these are expensive and wont get much use other than this trip.

My host over there has a Mac which I can use to transfer the files from card to Hard Drive.

The problem is if I use a PC and he uses a mac, how can I make sure I can save to HD using his mac and still access the files on my pc?

Cheers
 
Pretty sure that if you just copy files without converting the format in any way, the files will be readable with any computer (that can read photo files!) Surely a few big cards will be cheaper than a netbook, not to mention lighter and less bulky?
 
The cheapest solution would be just to buy a load of sd cards? P

They've got *really* affordable for big quantities
 
There is no problem on sharing the harddrive between Mac and reading it on PC.

However, it all depends on the filesystem you format the HD with. Just make sure to use ExFat or FAT. Don't use NTFS or HFS+.

You can select the format when formatting disc (on either Mac or PC).
 
Hi I've been in a similar situation very recently.

I'm currently I'm America but only with 45gb worth of cards. I've been here 3 days and used most of them up.

I bought a 500gb 'mypassport' and changed the file system to FAT32 which is fairly universal. It came with maybe exfat/ntfs or something else that didn't seem to work between the two. Don't know much on the topic and am taking figures off of the top of my head. The disk was only £40/£50 and came with a free 16gb stick too.

At home I primarily use windows, but with me at the moment I have a Linux laptop, so needed it to be compatible. FAT32 works nicely between the two. It might take you a bit of digging to get it formatted that way, as a lot of programs and windows cmd have a max size of something like 32gb when changing a disk to FAT32. Or at least I struggled when originally trying to format it that way.
 
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Steve-T said:
My host over there has a Mac which I can use to transfer the files from card to Hard Drive.

The problem is if I use a PC and he uses a mac, how can I make sure I can save to HD using his mac and still access the files on my pc?

Cheers
Click to expand...

shouldnt be a problem, what file system is the drive formatted to?

mpe said:
There is no problem on sharing the harddrive between Mac and reading it on PC.

However, it all depends on the filesystem you format the HD with. Just make sure to use ExFat or FAT. Don't use NTFS or HFS+.

You can select the format when formatting disc (on either Mac or PC).
Click to expand...

just enable NTFS writing on the hosts mac via terminal. i wouldnt ever suggest running a FAT storage drive.
 
Another option that I have heard travel photogs use, is to burn two cd's during your travels, (assuming you find a camera shop), you then keep one cd, and post the other one home. Just a thought.
 
If it is just between Mac and Windows the best choice of file system format is ExFat.

FAT32 should work fine, but it has some limitations (particularly maximum volume size and maximum file size)

neil_g said:
just enable NTFS writing on the hosts mac via terminal. i wouldnt ever suggest running a FAT storage drive.
Click to expand...
NTFS writing is disabled on Mac by default for a reason. If you care about reliability, don't use that.

ExFat is much better for sharing disk volumes between computers (it is not the same as the original FAT)
 
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mpe said:
If it is just between Mac and Windows the best choice of file system format is ExFat.

FAT32 should work fine, but it has some limitations (particularly maximum volume size and maximum file size)


NTFS writing is disabled on Mac by default for a reason. If you care about reliability, don't use that.

ExFat is much better for sharing disk volumes between computers (it is not the same as the original FAT)
Click to expand...
My backup drive is formatted ExFat for this reason. FAT32 has a 4GB file limit, NTFS is a pain on mac. ExFat is built into windows since XP SP2 and is also built in to OSX, since 10.6.5 according to Wiki.

That same backup drive is currently plugging into my work Win7 machine as I wanted to check when I last backed up, so I know it works.
 
If your host has an internet connection, why not upload to cloud? I get > 4gb / hr upload to amazon glacier, so if you can upload each night it shouldn't be a problem (dependent on your hosts upload speed...)
 
OK thanks for replies, plenty to consider.
The suggestions of buying loads of cards is not really a goer because shooting wildlife I can easily fill a couple of 32Gb or 16Gb cards a day so added up over 14 days at £35 - 40 a day that is expensive.
I will try and format to exFAT and use that on the Mac, the problem is as its not my Mac its not easy to predict what I can or be allowed to do.

Anyway I have bought a Hyperdrive UDMA2 750GB so I have that as a main backup and the usb hard Drive ifI can get that to work.

Cheers
Steve
 
maninsuitcase said:
My backup drive is formatted ExFat for this reason. FAT32 has a 4GB file limit, NTFS is a pain on mac. ExFat is built into windows since XP SP2 and is also built in to OSX, since 10.6.5 according to Wiki.

That same backup drive is currently plugging into my work Win7 machine as I wanted to check when I last backed up, so I know it works.
Click to expand...

My 500gb drive is now FAT32. It is possible.
 
maninsuitcase said:
Only if you don't mind losing everything on it/have somewhere to copy it to while you re-format the drive.
Click to expand...

Yes, sorry I thought we were talking about empty drives and preparing them for back up.
 
ACW said:
Yes, sorry I thought we were talking about empty drives and preparing them for back up.
Click to expand...

Then yes it's easy just reformat the drive and pick exfat instead of the default (ntfs on windows I think and hfs+ on mac). Pretty easy to do.
 
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