WD WiFi Backup gadget and potential Christmas present

ianp5a

ianp5a

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I just saw the Western Digital "My Passport Wireless" That lets you backup from SD card out in the field. As well as backup to your home Wifi hub when you get back. You can also view the content on you phone or tablet via Wifi. Meaning you are sure, when out in the field, that everything backed up OK. Or you can backup and browse your shots from the sofa without putting the PC on. Which for me us useful as I can stay with the family and not disappear into the office and mess with the PC.
wdsfMP_Wireless.png

Has anyone tried this? If so, does it work well? If so, it sounds like an ideal Christmas present for many photographers. :LOL:. "Darling! Forget about those socks!..."

Edit: I see Sandisk do a similar device. The others I saw didnt have a card slot.
 
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Do any backup from CF Card?
 
None that I saw has CF. (Actually, looking again, only 2 had card reader slots.) Anyway I thought CF was long dead.
 
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gramps said:
I don't think so :)
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It it absolutely true. I do think that. In the last 8 years the cameras I've bought have had SD. So SD has been around a while. I didn't think people would still use older cameras.
 
ianp5a said:
It it absolutely true. I do think that. In the last 8 years the cameras I've bought have had SD. So SD has been around a while. I didn't think people would still use older cameras.
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D3S, D4, D4S - all of these use CF entirely or in Slot 2.
 
ianp5a said:
It it absolutely true. I do think that. In the last 8 years the cameras I've bought have had SD. So SD has been around a while. I didn't think people would still use older cameras.
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Pro end bodies all still use cf as far as I know. It's a more robust card.

Consumer models yes I'd agree have all switched to SD.
 
I use one of these http://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-98243-MediaShare-Wireless/dp/B00CZ0P0PS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419066900&sr=8-1&keywords=verbatim wireless mediashare.
It's only £30, gives you the same facilities and allows you to use any USB HDD to backup to. Still only for SD cards though.

neil_g said:
My passport drives are horribly unreliable in my experience.
The USB ports are soldered to the drive so you can't even recover your data WHEN it fails.
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I use the 1Tb ones quite a lot and have always found them to be pretty robust and reliable. Of course, I might just be the lucky one :)
 
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ralphhardwick said:
I use one of these http://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-98243-MediaShare-Wireless/dp/B00CZ0P0PS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419066900&sr=8-1&keywords=verbatim wireless mediashare.
It's only £30, gives you the same facilities and allows you to use any USB HDD to backup to. Still only for SD cards though.



I use the 1Tb ones quite a lot and have always found them to be pretty robust and reliable.
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The 2.5" usb3 are awful. Ive had 6-8 staff personal drives in with failures over as many months.

It wouldn't ne so much of an issue with other drives but with these the USB port and controller are soldered to the drives main board so you can't even hook the drive up using Sata to recover the data.
 
Is there a 1-click app that supports backup to it from Linux?... ;)
 
I'll be backing up to the home network NAS. So I presume WD will make it easy to do. It's designed for normal people.
neil_g said:
My passport drives are horribly unreliable in my experience. The USB ports are soldered to the drive so you can't even recover your data WHEN it fails.
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The difference in this type of device is the Card reader and wifi. It's ideal for short term camera backup and transfer. I'd not really want it for storage.

ralphhardwick said:
I use one of these http://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-98243-MediaShare-Wireless/dp/B00CZ0P0PS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419066900&sr=8-1&keywords=verbatim wireless mediashare.
It's only £30, gives you the same facilities and allows you to use any USB HDD to backup to. Still only for SD cards though.
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Thanks. You could plug in a CF card reader to this one if you have one of those cameras mentioned.
 
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ianp5a said:
I'll be backing up to the home network NAS. So I presume WD will make it easy to do. It's designed for normal people.
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You can presume - but you're probably wrong ;)

It can be used:
  • as a wireless "network" in its own right. That is, you can connect to it like you do your wireless router and read/write files as a network mount (i.e. as you do with your NAS, just that you will be connected to it alone rather than your home network).
  • as a client to your wireless network. It will look like a NAS so you read and write files as you do with your NAS. This is mutually exclusive with the above (i.e. if you want to do both, you have to swap modes by visiting the inbuilt web server as far as I can tell).
  • as a USB drive.

The backup software that comes with it (WD SmartWare) is Windows only and appears to be so you can back up to it. There is no backup software with it for Linux as far as I can tell (Linux isn't "supported"). You can set it up to copy SD cards automatically on insert - which means it can be used in the field as a backup medium (although it isn't clear how performant it is, but that's probably a minor issue if you want it as a way of duplicating the data on an SD card in the field). It also supports FTP so if you have a wireless camera that will copy across a network, you can get that to work too.

There also doesn't appear to be any automatic way to get it to back itself up anywhere. It will just look like a drive - either locally or remotely - depending on how you connect it to the network.
 
Card reader and wifi aside I'd suggest they use the same drives.

My professional opinion and advise - avoid the wd passport drives. Even if only short term storage.

I'd also agree with what andy said, I cannot imagine it an easy process getting data to the Nas without a computer.
 
I use the WD My Passport 1Tb drives as my main working storage for Lightroom. I import, from SD card, onto the Passport drive. When its full I simply use another one. This way I keep my laptop memory clear but still have fast access to my photos.
The Passport drives are then backed up to a RAID device, which in turn is backed up to a cloud storage account. Once the file is copied to all three I then consider reformatting the SD card.
I go away on overland expeditions, in my Land Rover, to some pretty remote locations (Sahara, Arctic Circle, Iceland, etc.) when away I use a Passport drive and the verbatim media share to copy my cards each day. The card is then stored away and I use a new card each day. This way I have 3 copies of each file (my camera has two card slots, 1 for RAW and 1 for a jpg copy).
To date I have not had a single failure with any of the Passport drives.

I prefer the idea of separating the wifi from the HDD as it keeps the complexity down, and thus points of failure, in one device.
 
I use a passport (standard version) when travelling and have had no issues so far. That said it has been for back up purposes and is not the primary data store.

ianp5a said:
It it absolutely true. I do think that. In the last 8 years the cameras I've bought have had SD. So SD has been around a while. I didn't think people would still use older cameras.
Click to expand...

The highest performance most expensive pro DSLRs on the market today use CF cards (albeit some have SD card slots for backup).
 
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Lol. I'm glad it got a laugh. But I could afford to be very confident. As it was absolutely true that I did think that CF was long dead. I know nothing about the specs of those cameras. But the potential misinterpretation was where it sounded like gramps didn't think that I thought that CF was long dead. Which I genuinely did.
And the fact that you nicely informed me about those cameras shows that you, on the other hand, 'do' think I thought that CF was long dead.
Brilliant stuff!
 
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neil_g said:
My passport drives are horribly unreliable in my experience.

The USB ports are soldered to the drive so you can't even recover your data WHEN it fails.
Click to expand...

The new ones are completely integrated boards, no longer are they standard drives with and USB to sata convertor. As for failures, I have two in a backpack that travel on a motorbike everyday and have survived three years so far. Just completed a project, seeding data from 2tb WD drives sent through parcel post to 220 sites and returned so we could seed offsite backups at the data centre. We had one failure, which was replaced under warranty. I planned for a 5% failure rate due to the posting. Most of the time the remote sites didn't return the items in the correct packaging. Just the bare drive in the posting bag supplied.
 
yup the usb port is part of the drive board. makes them impossible to recover by stripping the drive out of the case.

couldnt comment on how the drives were handled. but the amount ive seen failed makes for a poor stat either way, seems to suggest that the drives are unreliable rather than most others that the enclosures are unreliable.
 
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