Posted by Drew Fulton on June 10, 2006 at 10:28 PM
As many of you know, I will be on the road for a year photographing starting in August as I travel the Australian continent. I am currently trying to figure out a reasonable method for storing all of my images. I will have a laptop with me but will need some sort of external storage that can be operated in a car (w/ inverter). I am thinking external hard drives but am currently extremely frustrated with buying cases and building my own as I just had 3 of 4 stop working as I travelled from Maine to Florida. I will be posting on them later this evening for help. Any other ideas?
For ulitimate security when traveling, we burn to CDs and mail them home. I talked to a friend today who just returned from a trip. It would break your heart to hear her account, but her laptop was stolen from her hotel room in a major US city. In the case. Along with her portable drives. Along with a dozen or so CF cards. At the end of a long trip. Didn't lose any camera gear, but she lost almost 200gb of accumulated photos.
We use the Epson P2000 and P4000 for downloads in the field. We use Wiebetech 120gb portable drives for additional storage along with the internal drives on our laptops. That all adds up to a huge amount of storage between two people, but we still end up burning discs at some point simply to free up space in only two months of travel.
My biggest complaint with the Epson units is that they are USB, which is painfully slow compared to firewire, whatever the advertising claims to the contrary. The Wiebetech drives are firewire and incredibly fast by comparison. If you need to economize and have plenty of CF cards, simply carry a card reader and download to your laptop each night. It will be much faster in the long run.
Posted by Drew Fulton on June 11, 2006 at 12:28 AM
Thanks Hank,
I guess I should clarify my point a bit. I am not too worried about the day to day storage in the field as I will have an Epson P2000 and a good stock of CF cards but I am worried more about the sheer accummulation of images since I will be spending an entire year with my only task being to travel and photograph. I will be living out a car and won't have a home base that I can return to during the year. Everything I have will be carried with me in the car. I am thinking burning and mailing DVDs is a really good idea and will probably do that to some extent as well as storing things seperate.
At the moment I am thinking 2 mirrored external hard drives (each stored seperately in the car) and a DVD copy mailed somewhere on a weekly basis or so. As I fill the hard drives I can either mail one drive and carry one with me or carry both.
I'd get a spare inverter. We have had them fail at a fairly high rate, usually at least once a year. Our current favorite is a 3-year old 300 watt unit from Radioshack. It comes with interchangeable cord terminals, allowing you to either connect directly to the vehicle battery or plug into the cigarette lighter- a really handy feature for long drives as well as camp time. It also has a changeable fuse, which has saved it several times. We tried units as small as 100 watts and though they worked, I suspect they were "working too hard" which ended their life sooner than this 300 watt unit. Even though we're happy with this one we carry a spare one NIB somewhere in our truck. You will be up the veritable creek if you don't have a backup at this critical juncture.
I don't know about the availability of blank DVD's in remote regions of Australia, but they are almost nonexistent in small towns in the US Southwest. Not really an issue since your burner probably handles both. We don't use DVDs since the internal mac burner is too slow with them.
It's worth signing back up to suggest a refinement to our system. That Radioshack 300w inverter has a cooling fan which seems to draw a lot from the truck battery even with light loads. We have run the battery down several times while remaining in one spot several days and not running the truck for a recharge. Caution and monitoring is required. If and when the current 300w unit (as well as the backup!) will ever break down, I would definitely look for another that doesn't draw so badly, but still have the interchangeable cord terminals.
Have you looked into any of the solar chargers? In Australia they should work great, while providing backup to your inverter, as well as the option for "multi-tasking" charges in addition to the two outlets on the RS 300w unit.
We haven't dealt with the company, but there's a wide assortment of gear and food for thought here.
Discussion
5 repliesDrew
We use the Epson P2000 and P4000 for downloads in the field. We use Wiebetech 120gb portable drives for additional storage along with the internal drives on our laptops. That all adds up to a huge amount of storage between two people, but we still end up burning discs at some point simply to free up space in only two months of travel.
My biggest complaint with the Epson units is that they are USB, which is painfully slow compared to firewire, whatever the advertising claims to the contrary. The Wiebetech drives are firewire and incredibly fast by comparison. If you need to economize and have plenty of CF cards, simply carry a card reader and download to your laptop each night. It will be much faster in the long run.
I guess I should clarify my point a bit. I am not too worried about the day to day storage in the field as I will have an Epson P2000 and a good stock of CF cards but I am worried more about the sheer accummulation of images since I will be spending an entire year with my only task being to travel and photograph. I will be living out a car and won't have a home base that I can return to during the year. Everything I have will be carried with me in the car. I am thinking burning and mailing DVDs is a really good idea and will probably do that to some extent as well as storing things seperate.
At the moment I am thinking 2 mirrored external hard drives (each stored seperately in the car) and a DVD copy mailed somewhere on a weekly basis or so. As I fill the hard drives I can either mail one drive and carry one with me or carry both.
Any ideas on how to improve on this?
Drew
I don't know about the availability of blank DVD's in remote regions of Australia, but they are almost nonexistent in small towns in the US Southwest. Not really an issue since your burner probably handles both. We don't use DVDs since the internal mac burner is too slow with them.
Have you looked into any of the solar chargers? In Australia they should work great, while providing backup to your inverter, as well as the option for "multi-tasking" charges in addition to the two outlets on the RS 300w unit.
We haven't dealt with the company, but there's a wide assortment of gear and food for thought here.