If you are travelling with your photography equipments, probably you will not like to lug your laptop around. It is simply too much to carry. There are options like PMPs with built in hard drives and SD card slots which you can carry. They are ideal backup solutions, but bit expensive at $200 upwards. I hit up on a simple idea, which can help me save a lot of money but give me an excellent backup option with no need to invest any additional Rupee. I pulled out the following items which I no longer use:
- A old Sharp Zaurus Linux PDA with a compact flash and SD card slot.
- A few compact flash cards varying in capacity from 512 MBto 2GB. Total capacity: 4 GB.
Any PDA with both a compact flash and SD card slot will do. Many older iPAQs had this option. You can get those at a pretty cheap price from ebay. Whenever you want to take a backup, you can just insert the CF and SD cards simultaneously and copy over the contents from the SD card to the CF card. Then delete the pictures from the SD card. The SD is ready to shoot again.
I was just wondering what to do with all the CF cards from my old camera and PDAs. Now they are back in action!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Vishal 05.15.07 at 2:26 am
Hey, this is a great solution! I’ve been wondering about plonking down some money for a portable backup when I’m on the road, and am always reluctant to get a harddisk because it has very little other functionality, and a laptop just seems like a bit too much to lug around.
(goes a-hunting for old PDAs…)