Memory cards, portable hard drives and travel

<p>Related question for a forthcoming trip to Tanzania. Has anyone used Lightroom on a small notebook computer with something like the Western Digital My Passport for backup? Have you ever used Lightroom to organize photos that exist on an external USB power drive?<br>

My goal here is to be able to organize the shoot and select the winners during my return flight from Dar, transfer the images and catalogue to my desktop machine for color correction, contrast adjustments, etc. and, when necessary, go into Photoshop for final edits, and get the project packaged for a website and book relatively quickly.<br>

I will be in very primitive conditions when outside of Dar. I have plenty of CF cards and a Wolverine for backup, but would like to use the two days back in Dar and the flight itself to separate final candidates from outtakes.</p>

<p>Related question for a forthcoming trip to Tanzania. Has anyone used Lightroom on a small notebook computer with something like the Western Digital My Passport for backup? Have you ever used Lightroom to organize photos that exist on an external USB power drive?<br>

My goal here is to be able to organize the shoot and select the winners during my return flight from Dar, transfer the images and catalogue to my desktop machine for color correction, contrast adjustments, etc. and, when necessary, go into Photoshop for final edits, and get the project packaged for a website and book relatively quickly.<br>

I will be in very primitive conditions when outside of Dar. I have plenty of CF cards and a Wolverine for backup, but would like to use the two days back in Dar and the flight itself to separate final candidates from outtakes.</p>

<p>Jim, that is a variation of what I do except that I use NX2. First I download (upload?) my RAW photos from the cards to my notebook with a second copy to a Passport. I keep the photos on the card until I need it again, giving me a third copy.</p>

<p>As for reviewing photos, it is easier to dump the bad ones right from the card in-camera but sometimes there is no time to review them. Instead, I usually do it right from the computer in NX, not the Passport. The bad stuff gets dumped from the puter but not from the Passport, I guess in case I change my mind or something.</p>

<p>If there is enough time like occassionally in the evenings, I will edit some of the photos, maybe even batch process some of them, then save the JPEGs. As I finish a batch of JPEGs, they are also copied to the Passport. In a perfect world, this is all finished before I arrive home. Never seen that perfect world yet but you get the idea.</p>

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<p>Bruce,<br>

Thanks for the response. I think the real issue for me is that I need a notebook computer whose HDD capacity matches what I intend to use it for. 40GB doesn't get you very far these days. Then, the existing Wolverine and enough CF cards will provide double protection.<br>

Jim</p>

<p>Found this thread because I'm now in the market for portable media. I've seen a number of the threads post about wolverines, but I thought I would provide my experience with their 80GB ESP. I was initially quite pleased with the device, but in less than 1 year, the device failed (hard drive failure -- path does not exist). I repaired the hard-drive and less than a year later, it failed again. I haven't been using it much because of lack of confidence, but now with the second failure, I think that this device is not sufficiently reliable. Maybe I just got a lemon -- twice.<br>

I also have a wolverine flashpac that I've used now for a year. My only two issues with the flashpac is that it eats battery power (as noted in other posts). Although I haven't tested it in this fashion, I am reasonable certain that it would not last long enough to fill the HD on one charge. It also doesn't provide confirmation that the files have transferred successfully, although you can implicitly tell that files transferred by the number of GB before and after. </p>