[Leica] On the Road backup dupes.....

[Frank Filippone]

Or, how to make field backups of Digital Images

 

 

Every so often, someone asks what to do about backing up, in the field,
their images.  This is some from on my experiences
.

 

My experience is limited to the products of Digital Foci
. They make a few
models, but I will address the Picture Porter 35 ( Recently discontinued,
but cost was $350) and the Photo Safe II ($159 for the most recent model).

 

Both offer the ability to backup from SD cards and CF cards with a (2 ½
inch) 500GB (SATA) HDD.  Both operated from built in batteries, and a
universal AC adapter is provided.  You can pop open the case and put in a
bigger HDDD if you prefer


 

I tried out both units
..  Both work
. With some caveats
..

 

The PP35 also can display images for some level of examination on a 3” LCD.
PSII has no display capability.

 

The PP35 has larger batteries and therefore can download more without being
plugged into AC Power or needing to have the battery charged.

 

The PP35 is 50% faster in image download.

 

The PP35 will interface with an external, portable HDD
 which means that you
could use multiple drives as backups in addition to the built in HDD.  Note:
ALL of these HDD both internal and external, need to formatted in FAT32, not
NTFS.

 

The PSII is about ½ the volumetric size of the PP35.

 

Both work fine with Leica R9 RAW files.  As well as Fuji XE-1, Nikon D7100,
D1x, D200 and D300, and any JPG files I could dig up.

 

The PP35 completely locked up with Sony A7 files, when asked to display
them.  The files were stored properly, but somehow the request to display
them caused the hangup.  I needed to remove the battery to get the unit to
operate.

 

Why did I do this?  Because, with some luck, we are going on a long trip
early next summer, and I just can not see juggling that many SD cards
. 

 

My $0.02

 

Frank Filippone

Red735i at verizon.net