Heading to WDW in a week and plan to take lots of picks, especially for WAI's. I will have my laptop with me but the question is--Do I need to get a portable hard drive or do I just keep the pics on my CF cards.
gary and i have differing schools of thought here... he carries a pile of CF's and leaves them be. i take my laptop and copy the cards to the hard drive, then make another copy onto an external hard drive (so they are in 2 places). i have a 320gb western digital passport (bus powered, no ac adaptor needed) that is tiny and doesn't weight anything so it's perfect. B&H has a 500gb for $115.... PERFECT! CLICK HERE
I doubt you'll fill up all your cards while in the parks, and if you have your laptop with you, you've got your portable hard drive right there with you back at the room. As long as you have enough cards to last you through a day of shooting, I wouldn't bother with a portable hard drive. I'd likely leave my shots on the cards AND download them to my laptop each night. If for any reason I ran out of space, I could then erase a card and start anew, since I've got them all copied to my harddrive...but I'd feel even better if I had all the pics on both the card AND the laptop! I'd just make sure to bring a USB cable for the camera, or a card reader, so you can drop everything on the laptop as a backup, and keep it all on the cards unless and until you run out of room.
I'll second that. Except that I'm still using my portable viewer as an external HD. So I have two copies, one on the laptop, and one on the card reader.
I use the laptop approach and back up to an old iPod I have. If I'm real nervous I might burn a DVD or two before I pack to go home.
Nancy is wanting me to invest in one of those Epson devices to dump my pictures into before we go to China within the next 3 years to adopt a child. She doesn't like the idea of my lugging my laptop halfway around the world, but wants me to take the camera to take tons of pictures. But as it stands now, I lug my laptop down and offload my pics every night. I have enough card space to get through 1 day of shooting
Well, I found a 320 GB external drive, usb powered, for right at $60 including shipping on ebay. So, I am going to try that. I am hesitant about using just my laptops hard drive as the only storage place for the pics as you never know when they can go bad. Already happened to me once. So, I'll backup each night to the laptop, to the external drive and keep the pics on the CF card provided I don't run out of cards. Hopefully, having them on 2 maybe 3 places will keep them safe.
I used to carry around a portable hard drive but 8 and 16 gb cards are cheap enough now that I just carry a few of those. I prefer to lug around as little as possible.
I have the same 320gb drive as mentioned by Tim & others. It is ideal for this sort of situation. I put everything on this drive & then copy it to my 1 TB drive when I get home. There it is kept for storage & the copy on my 320 portable is my working copy.
LaCie Rugged 80-500 GB available Firewire cost more than the USB Great compact drive What I take when I go. Janet
