Best/fastest back-up device in fiels?

[chrisdei]

I'll be on a month-long shoot in Africa and am looking for feed-back from users of Epson P-7000, Digital Foci, JoboGiga-Vu, Nexto Extreme Pro users as to best most reliable portable device for back-up under extreme conditions. Speed of transfer and reliability most important.Thanks so much.

[dcardinal]

Chris--The first thing you need to decide is if you need an LCD. You'll pay almost twice as much for the same size/speed if you want one of the models with an LCD. But if you don't have a laptop then an LCD may well be worth it for checking exposure, deleting rejects before you get home, etc.

I lead photo safaris to Africa and all of those brands have worked for people. Epson is a solid if not exotic choice where you pay for quality and the brand name. Jobo is a little more cutting edge. Digital Foci & Nexto units often come without LCD so they can be much cheaper but of course you can't view your images. So each has its place.

--David Cardinal
http://www.cardinalphoto.com

[mbaltuch]

At least, that is my opinion. The problem with any of the self-contained image storage units is that the transfer rate is generally slower and a single unit provides no redundancy. So now you have to buy two devices and that starts getting expensive.

The trade off, of course, is weight and size. I generally carry my laptop (Lenovo T61) and two 2.5" external, USB drives (Western Digital Passports). I put the images on one external drive and backup to the other. The big advantage, besides redundancy and speed, is the ability to run Lightroom and get some editing done. I can also email images while on the road, if I have Internet connectivity.

Mitch

[ddonohue]

I use a small notebook and 2 external 500 GB notebook size hard drives. I just recently purchased a Acer One mini laptop and I am very happy with it. It runs XP, along with breeze browser, downloader pro, and photoshop elements. I download to the notebook then copy the files to each of the eaternal drives. After copying I now have 2 copies of each file and delete the original from the notebood for the nextr days work.

Denny

[dgrall]

The Hyperdrive Colorspace is twice as fast as the Epson and has a small LCD for confirmation. It is faster to download to the Hyperddrive then using a netbook or larger laptop to copy those files to external harddrives for backup. Using a card reader with a laptop is painfully slow which is the other option for getting your images to external harddrives. If you don't want to take a laptop/netbook along, then you would need two hyperdrives which come in a large 250GB size. Two hyperdrives would cost more than a netbook and 2 external harddrives, but they would be more compact for air travel.

[chrisdei]

Thanks so much to all for the excellent responses. After an hour at B&H today, decided to go with the Hyperdrive Colorspace...really liked the Nexto Extreme Pro - only because of the SATA drive, but very big price tag so very grateful for your informative responses.