Portable Drive vs. More CF Cards?

What's the best/cheapest way to ensure you have enough storage capacity when you're going to be out in the field for an extended period?

I've found something called a Wolverine FlashPac that looks promising....

I take a laptop, a portable 500 MB USB external drive and a stack of cards. If I'm really out in the field - away from electricity - I take a fold-up solar panel as well. The Laptop and the external drive travel in different bags.

I said cheap!

So far I have chickened out on the Wolverine product. There are some not-so-good reviews out there. Seems like a great product that someone should do right.

I spend up to 5 months a year on the road, so it's laptop and drives for me. But I go one step further for security. I regularly burn DVDs and mail them home, in case my laptop or drive dies or is stolen. As for field time, I carry a two-day supply of CF cards (12 4-gb cards). If my stints away from the laptop were longer, I'd carry more.

I use 4 8 gig cards and a laptop. I've never had a problem with this setup, but I don't do trips longer than 2 weeks at a time.

I was wondering the same question - I'm going on a trip to South America in June and will not have access to a Laptop... don't really want to go out and buy a million CD and SD cards (My D300s has slots for both which helps a LOT). So hopefully someone on here has used the portable card reader drives?

I don't have a laptop either. I just ordered a 16GB Lexar card that will hopefully see me through the weeklong trip. I already have an 8GB and a 4GB.

This review (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=140768) made the card-reader drive sound good, but other reviews, such as on Amazon, were poor. B&H sells them but there are no reviews.

Have you considered a netbook and USB bus-powered DVD burner? That is my current idea if/when I end up in that situation again. It's been too long since I went on one of those two-week photography/camping trips. Technology has moved ahead of my old protocol...

CF cards were more expensive when I first got a dSLR, so I used 512k cards and a CD burner for back up. Now I've got huge cards the won't fit on a single CD (my burner won't span disks). Sigh.

The reason I'd want a removable media burner is for redundancy. With the CD system I made too copies of each card: mailed one home (in sets of 5 or 6) and kept the other with me. That redundancy factor is why I don't like the idea of just down-loading to a portable hard-drive.

Pete D.

I'll drop back in to add a couple of more points.

Long ago I bought one of the original Epson download devices for field use. I don't even remember the model #. It's rattling around in a drawer someplace, because it holds only 40GB, and worse, you can't manage much over 10GB of downloads before the battery is sucked dry. Later models with more capacity and much better battery life might be just the T for you.

And the other obvious thing is recharges. I'm seldom away from my truck for more than two days (hence the two day supply of cards), but I can be off-grid for weeks. I've got an inverter for my truck and use it to recharge camera batteries, the laptop and more. Mine current one is only 300w, but it's plenty for those jobs. Beware the inverter models with cooling fans, because they really suck down your vehicle battery.

Beside my three 8GB cards I have my Nexto portable harddrive with me if I think it might be necessary. It's a bit older and has only 40GB but I recently have read that I can upgrade it to maybe 160GB or even more. Their newer models have higher capacities of course. The nice thing is that they can read from the card without the need of a laptop as they have a card slot build in.

Well, a bunch of CF cards may seem less expensive compared to a portable storage unit, but it seems to me losing one or more of a lot of little CF cards is a lot easier than losing the portable storage unit.

If you are a landscape photographer you need far fewer cards than if you are a bird photographer. For a 7 day trip with weight limits I bought 2 Colorspace Hyperdrives, bare, and put in 500 GB drives. I can use 5 - 8GB cards on a really good day. You need the redundancy of two means of storage and some way to charge the batteries.

It is cheaper to buy your own drives for the Hyperdrives and the model I got is not good for editing out unsharp images so that had to wait until I got home. You really need a combination of more card space plus a storage device.

I have an Epson 5000 with 80G of storage and like it a lot. It is easy to carry and has a very good 4" screen for initial screening . The battery life has not been a problem.

Digital Foci www.digitalfoci.com has a new line of portable drives that have much larger memorys and are signifacantly cheaper than Epson. You might want to look at those. I saw them at NANPA a few weeks ago and was impressed.

Let me argue again for a laptop. It lets you see your prints at a decent size, holds a ton of photos, enables backups and provides more secure internet access if the occasion arises. A decent laptop isn't cheap, but it is economical in comparison to good lenses or a new camera body. Or, worse still, the loss of a week's photos.

For power in the field, I use a Brunton Solar Panel and couldn't be happier. Unlike Hank, I do get a long ways away from my truck for days at a time, and the Brunton works even on cloudy days.

I am now ususally bringing a laptop when I travel overseas. In the past I just usually brought a portable storage device and a bunch of cards. I currently have a Jobo Giga One Sonic card reader that holds 160gb and costs about $200 on B&H. It certainly takes up a lot less space than a laptop and gets the job done in terms of getting images backed up. I've gone through 3 of these Jobo devices through the years. they seem to last a couple of years and then crash. Luckily, I've never had a crash where I wasn't later able to recover the images. When I take my laptop I back up to both of them and keep them in different bags, that way if one gets lost or stolen, I'm not out of luck.