which best storage solution during a safari

<p>Dear all,<br>

I just got my D500 before leaving in 1 month to Namibia and Bostwana.<br>

As we'll be away almost 3 weeks, I wonder which storage / back-up solution is best?<br>

Since the camera has built-in wifi, does it mean I can just get a back-up solution such as a WD passport wireless or LaCie Fuel and copy the pictures on the cards in the camera to the hard drive ? is that a solution ?<br>

any advice on the best (fastest, not too expensive, and lightest storage/back-up solution ?</p>

<p>thanks a lot</p>

<p>Didier</p>

<p>I just came home after a three-week trip to southern Africa. I was in Cape Town for 4 days and then went to a two-week safari in Botswana. Between my wife and me, we had two MacBooks with us and I backed up onto portable hard drives, including a Samsung SSD:<br>

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1217667-REG/samsung_mu_pt500b_am_500gb_t3_portable_solid.html</p>

<p>I am well aware that hard drives and SSD are depreciating rapidly. Therefore, I got a 500G SSD as I was quite sure that it would hold all of my images. I ended up with about 14K images that take up just below 400G.</p>

<p>I don't particularly trust backup methods unless I can verify things with a computer. Since 128G memory cards are quite affordable now, you can get sufficient cards to store all of your images for the trip.</p>

<p>best practice would be upload to external location (SSD drive) + cloud storage. </p>

I returned from a two week vacation earlier today and I used the same method as Shun - laptop plus portable hard drive.

The reviews on wifi enabled drives is quite variable, so stayed clear of those.

<p>Always back up your files to a hard drive, either external or internal, at the end of the day. It is a good practice to re-format your memory cards before use the next day.</p>

<p>Cloud storage could be a good option in a city/suburb setting. However, here we are talking about a safari in southern Africa. In the last two week when I was in Botswana, I rarely had internet access. Additionally, I was capturing like 40G, 50G of RAW files a day. Uploading wasn't very practical even though if I had a fast connection.</p>

<p>Another issue to keep in mind is that traditional mechanical, spinning hard drives are the most vulnerable part of any computer system. For any important images, I would never backup on just one hard drive. Typically I would make 3 or more backups on different hard drives. I know that I am more on the extremely careful side, but I would use at least 2 drives. That was also why I paid extra to get an external SSD, which is far more reliable solid state storage. I got it for reliability, not necessarily the speed, which is a good side effect.</p>

<p>Shun,<br>

What camera did you use? Just curious.</p>

<p>Javier, on the recent Botswana trip, I was using 20MP DSLRs, same as the D500 the OP has in mind. Last year, I went on a two-week cruise at the Galapagos Islands. I was using a D750 and a D7200 back then, both 24MP cameras, and I ended up with 13K images over two weeks and a total of just below 400G of disk space.</p>

<p>The D500 is 20MP instead of 24 on the D750, but the D500 has 10 fps vs. 6.5 fps on the D750. Therefore, it pretty much evens out. When there is wildlife action, it is common for me to capture 1000 images a day and it adds up quickly.</p>

<p>When I traveled to South Africa, I carried my MacBook Pro, 2 western digital passport drives (2 TB) and lots of CF and SD multiple cards.<br>

My workflow was simple<br>

At the end of the day, I would transfer all of the pictures into an Aperture Library (now it would be a lightroom catalog) on passport drive #1. During transfer, I would number the pictures and add general keywords. Immediately following transfer, I would backup passport drive #1 on to passport drive #2. When out and about, I would carry cards and extra batteries. When I card filled up I put in a new card into the camera. I tried not to reuse cards. I figured this model gave me three copies of the pictures and two different media. When on the move, I carried one drive and my wife carried the second drive. <br>

Internet connectivity can be very very spotty to non-existent so reliance on cloud storage is not a great idea.<br>

The weight a cable is very minor and I would not rely on WiFi transfer to a drive (simply not enough of an advantage)<br>

While weighting a bit more than other solutions and perhaps a bit more costly, the digital asset harvesting and backup solution was a very very tiny fraction of the total cost of the trip. <br>

I would also encourage you to take a second body (rent one is an inexpensive solution) and take long, fast lenses. I took a tripod, but did not use it.<br>

These model has worked well on several international trips.</p>

<p>That is awesome Shun. What contrast. On a full day of street shooting for me, it is rare for me to shoot more than 100 images. Most often it is half that. How ever, when shooting my grand daughters or Grand sons soccer games, out comes the machine gun. I am amazed at the keeper rate of the D500 AMAZING. </p>

<p>As for travel, I too carry a portable WD hard drive and lap top as well. it is a must. I also use the secondary card purely as back up, so both cards mirror each other. </p>

<p>Last November in India I had a large enough storage on my laptop to store one copy there of the unedited files (RAW + small jpg).<br /> I also had enough cards that I was able to leave the original cards alone for most of the trip, and finally,<br /> I got a couple of 1TB drives, each the size of a deck of playing cards. I kept edited files on one, the originals on the other.<br /> I'm a materialist, and don't have faith in spiritual things like wireless and the internet, especially away from my home base.<br>

Oh, and don't forget to take a manual for the camera with you. ;)</p>

<p>To me, what is important for any backup scheme is that it must be verifiable. While I don't necessarily check every file (way too time consuming), at least I need to be able to check the total number of files copied, the file sizes, and choose a few sample image files to open. I would never trust any setup where you just stick a memory card into some device, wired or wireless, and assume everything is correctly copied. I also don't trust just one copy of backup. When you have 2, 3 copies of backup, the chance for a totally failure starts becoming extremely remote.</p>

<p>Since SD cards are fairly inexpensive nowadays, it is totally feasible to get 2 or 3 128G SD cards and never reuse one during the trip. Each 128G SD can be around $70 or so. That is pretty cheap compared to the cost for an African safari. Even 128G XQD cards are not that expensive any more, compared to prices back in January when Nikon announced the D5 and D500, but they still cost considerably more than SD.</p>

<p>As far as shooting rate goes, if I am shooting static subjects, I may get 2, 3 takes of each scene, but it won't be more than hundred or two images a day. When you are dealing with wildlife action, it is a completely different game.</p>

<p>For example, one day in Botswana, our safari vehicle was in a safari traffic jam as a lot of vehicles were searching for some lions. Our car was stuck in traffic for a few minutes. Suddenly these two crested francolins had a territorial dispute and started fighting. They were kicking each other like to kick boxers. That fight lasted over 3 minutes as they moved around, and the lighting and background kept changing. Meanwhile I was stuck inside the vehicle (couldn't get out due to the lions around) and some back lit situation. In 3 minutes I captured over 250 frames. Of course, most of those were junk, but I ended up with a few interesting action images.</p><div></div>

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<p>I ended up with about 14K images</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Sorry, this is OT, but it just occurred to me that in the "good old film days" this would have equaled about 390 rolls of 36-exposure film, weighing in at around 24lbs; and there would have been no backup at all.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Since the camera has built-in wifi, does it mean I can just get a back-up solution such as a WD passport wireless or LaCie Fuel and copy the pictures on the cards in the camera to the hard drive ? is that a solution ?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Could be quite slow depending on the number of images to be transferred. It also eats into the camera's battery life. I rather carry a notebook, card reader, and at least two external hard drives. Like Shun, I am not a friend of those devices where I can't verify the backup.</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>Sorry, this is OT, but it just occurred to me that in the "good old film days" this would have equaled about 390 rolls of 36-exposure film, weighing in at around 24lbs; and there would have been no backup at all.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Back in the late 1990's, I went on two similar trips to Africa, when I would bring 100 rolls of slide film on each trip. Back then, film + processing was about $10 per roll of slide, making that about $1000 for film and processing per trip. There was no way I would shoot 390 rolls of film per trip; the bulk and cost were just prohibitive. In other words, most likely I would probably never capture the image attached above with film, not because it was impossible, but any attempt would be too costly.</p>

<p>Clearly digital has drastically changed my photography and most likely that for many others. I would never have done surfing photography or captured wildlife so liberally. I still recall that a decade ago, I was in a seminar by the late wedding photographer Monte Zucker. He said once his studio has an electrical problem that caused a fire (perhaps in the 1990's, during the film era), which burned down his studio and totally destroyed the unpressed negatives from a dozen or so weddings. Fortunately, his clients understood the situation. Today with digital, such problem shouldn't happen again. I, for one, routinely store backups of my image at multiple locations.</p>

<p>Even compared to 5 years ago, memory cards are so much cheaper today that my storage and backup procedure is quite different from a few years ago. As recently as last year, I thought external SSDs were kind of expensive. I would imagine that in another year or two, I would travel with only SSD and no more conventional spinning hard drives.</p>

<p>Something else to consider about cloud storage - the band width available in an internet cafe and hotel will require more hours than you can spend to upload a day's raw files, even if you can keep the link open that long. Add to that the risk of acquiring one of the many internet viruses and the cloud doesn't look like much of an option.</p>

<p>I'm with Shun on backup - duplicate storage is the minimum acceptable system. I buy portable hard drives in pairs, copy a day's shooting to a directory with the day's date for a name (e.g., 20160714), and once the day's work is copied, copy that directory to the second drive. I open a few files on each drive for a functional test, like Shun, too. The hard drive on my old laptop I use for travel is too small to allow me to use it to hold one of the copies, hence the need for 2 portable drives. I understand the benefit of the SSD types - no moving parts is always better.</p>

<p>Paranoia is a good thing - it's been keeping our species alive for over 100,000 years, and works really well for data storage.</p>

<p>Like Shun and others, I also make multiple copies of files on separate hard drives as well as my laptop. And I know this goes without saying, but all of the copies are always with us in our carry-on and never in checked luggage when flying.</p>

<p>Great and timely thread. Thanks to Shun and everyone else for the valuable information.</p>

<p>As to film days... I started shooting film in the 70's. Fortunately I'd met a local photographer who took me under his wings and among other things taught me the value of rolling my own film and that so long as you were careful a slightly oversize cassette could hold 50-60 frames (it only took a few scratched images to get the hang of when to stop winding new film in). This was a huge help on the cost side as well as needing less storage and fewer changes. You had to use pro labs as others didn't know how to deal with the longer film.</p>

<p>When I shot format cameras it was one image at a time and 30-60 seconds between images. As much as I love digital I sometimes think I produced better images then because I had to think a lot more about each shot. From a backup standpoint, we had one paranoid client who would take every other shot and give them to a kid to take to the lab while the rest went at the end of the day to a different lab. Making copies in the field wasn't an option. :-)</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Since the camera has built-in wifi, does it mean I can just get a back-up solution such as a WD passport wireless or LaCie Fuel and copy the pictures on the cards in the camera to the hard drive ? is that a solution ?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Nope, the D500 WiFi cannot be used without snapbridge which u need to use on a compatible smartphone or tablet ( for now android only), and it works only on a few devices satisfactory but on most it is a pain to use if it works at all...), so the camera will not connect to the drive through WiFi..</p>

<p>I use a Hard drive with builtin cardreader, this drive copies everything which is on an SD card that i put into the drives SD slot. The drive also has a built reloadable battery, so it can be used "on the Move" for this function if really necessary, but i do not use that function much as you cannot check whether everything is copied in good order without using a PC..<br /> So all in all i stick to using a laptop , from which i copy imported ( and often already selected) images to the portable hard drive when in my hotel room afterwards, that way they are both on my PC and on the drive and can safely remove them from the SD (and now XQD) cards.</p>

<p>I am attaching an image showing the size difference between a typical portable hard drive, in this case a Western Digital 2T, but I have a 4T Seagate (purchased from Costco) that is about the same size. The Samsung SSD is tiny. I have a 500G, but there is a 2T version that looks exactly the same. However, that one costs close to $800 that is way too much an overkill for me at this point. I have no doubt that SSD will depreciate rapidly such that I'll get more capacity when it is more affordable in another year or two.</p>

<p>Besides Samsung, a number of brands sell similar external SSDs, e.g. SanDisk, which is now owned by Western Digital.</p>

<p>Of course, like Barry, I carry all backup copies in my carry-on luggage, but with the SSD, I go a step further and keep it on me with my passport on the return flight.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>When I shot format cameras it was one image at a time and 30-60 seconds between images. As much as I love digital I sometimes think I produced better images then because I had to think a lot more about each shot.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>It sounds like you are/were more a studio and/or landscape photographer. In reality, the medium (film or digital) should not change your discipline much. If you shoot action, e.g. wildlife action during an African safari or a lot of sports, you would never have 30 to 60 seconds to plan your images unless it is predictable action. Wildlife wouldn't cooperate and leave you that much time to think.</p>

<p>When I shoot landscape with digital, my disciplines don't change: I still wait for the right light, wait for the cloud to move out of the way or into the picture .... Landscape photography is still a slower process. While auto-focus and digital give you the additional options to shoot rapidly and many many frames without incurring some high film and processing cost, I only shoot rapidly when it is necessary.</p><div></div>

<p>Interresting alternative Shun, using a SSD , <br>

Ii guess you are also using a laptop ( PC / Mac) to transfer the immages to the SSD , so do you prefer to carry a "Mini" laptop ( or MAc Air version) for that , or something with a larger screensize for this ?</p>

<p>I was in Botswana in Nov 2016 for about 9 days of in country shooting.<br>

Your backup strategy depends greatly on the file size of each file that ends up on the card in the camera and then onto your laptop, external HD, etc and the number of pictures you expect to take during each game drive. On my trip I had a Nikon D810 and a D800E, shot in RAW, and downloaded and backed up each day. Each image file taken was about 40-45 MB. That was my starting point for figuring out everything that I needed. <br>

My workflow was to download each card to 1TB Sanyo ColorSpace2 Hyperdrive (I had two of these, one for each camera's cards.); then download to my laptop; and then copy from the laptop to two 2TB USB 3 External Hard Drives. The laptop's hard drive would not hold all of the images I took on the trip. I do not recall the hard drive space needed for all images taken, but it was more than 1TB. <br>

I was glad that I had 2 of the external hard drivers. When I got home and started to transfer the images from the ex HD, I got a message that one of the drives had bad sectors or some such warning. I try and tripple backup all the time.<br>

I have and use the 1TB SSD external hard drive. It was my emergency drive in case I needed it. I wish I had a 2TB version. <br>

I do not know if there is a hyperdrive model that will accept XQD Cards. If you are going to use a Nikon D500, you need to factor into your workflow images on XQD cards. <br>

My Sony Vaio laptop has USB3 ports and win 7 with 12GB Ram. It takes time to download and backup so you need everything to be fast if time (and electricity) is limited like on a safari. <br>

Joe Smith</p>

<p>Concerning XQD cards, I brought an XQD card reader with me, one that came with one of my Sony XQD cards. In case that workflow fails (e.g. you forget your XQD card reader), the D500 (and D5) has a micro USB-B Super Speed jack. As long as you have the right cable, which is also used on a lot of current USB-3 external hard drives, you can connect the D500 directly onto a computer to upload your images on the XQD card.</p>

<p>Finally, on pretty much all Nikon DSLRs with dual memory cards, from the playback menu, you can request the DSLR to copy images from one card to the other. In other words, you can get the D500 to copy images from the XQD card to the SD card (or vice versa), and then you can plug the SD card directly onto most laptops to upload the images. I had rehearsed that procedure prior to my trip just in case I needed it, but I never did during the actual trip. My XQD card reader worked fine throughout the trip.</p>

<p>Dear all,<br>

thank you for those detailed and useful comments.<br>

Weight for the trip is limited, electricity may be scarce sometimes.<br />My laptop is 2011 MacBook Pro : it weighs 2 kg, which is not light when weight is limited.<br>

I'd like not to have to take it with me. <br />Joe, I am very interested in the <strong>Hyperdrive</strong> : from what I read, you can attach a XQD reader through the usb port, so I could back up everything from the D500 to the hyperdrive.<br>

If I understand right, you can even back-up the Hyperdrive to an external drive without laptop.<br>

What do you all think of that solution ?</p>

<p>Didier</p>

<p>I just checked Sanho's website and B&H Photo for info about the Hyperdrive Colorspace. What follows needs to be checked out in that I am not a MAC person or a tech person. <br>

The Hyperdrive to get is the NEW one--ColorSpace UDMA3<br>

<a href="https://www.hypershop.com/products/hyperdrive-colorspace-udma3">https://www.hypershop.com/products/hyperdrive-colorspace-udma3</a> <br>

Here is info on the 1TB model:<br>

<a href="http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1191267-REG/sanho_shdcsudma31tb_1tb_colorspace_udma_3.html">http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1191267-REG/sanho_shdcsudma31tb_1tb_colorspace_udma_3.html</a><br>

Here are some specs from B&H: <br>

Memory Card Support CF / SD / SDHC / SDXC<br>

Ports 1 x USB 2.0 high speed port<br>

1 x USB 3.0 computer interface port<br>

1 x micro-USB charging port, 5 V<br>

Q&A from B&H: <br>

Can you use this with a XQD card reader with USB 3.0 cable attachment? I see that it does allow for "direct plug in with CF and SD cards, but wasn't sure if there was a USB port that could be used for XQD downloads.<br>

David K on Apr 27, 2016<br>

BEST ANSWER: Yes; the Sanho HyperDrive ColorSpace UDMA 3 Wireless Storage Device has a USB-A female port on the top of the storage device that will accept a USB cable from a card reader to transfer files from the card reader to the storage device. Pages 5-10 of the instruction manual states how to transfer files from external devices to the storage device.<br>

Does the device work with a Mac. I read that it formats the HD in FAT32 which is a PC format. has anyone tried to plug and transfer to Mac?<br>

layo m on May 20, 2016<br>

BEST ANSWER: Yes, I have been able to connect the device to my MacBook Pro and transfer files into Apple's Photo application using the included cable. I'm running OS X version 10.11.15 on the Mac and did not need to install any specialized software.</p>

<p>I need to check my ColorSpace UDMA2 to see if it has that USB-A female port. I do not think it has this port. <br>

Joe Smith</p>

Shun in your back up workflow don't you delete the

shots that are clearly bad (out of focus etc)? If you have

a laptop sorting shouldn't be an issue and you would

save some space (considerably, when shooting at high frame rates).