Storage solutions on trips? CD's?

                      Has anybody had any luck with dive shops or liveaboards offering hard drive storage then writing cd's of your pictures?  

...  They could set up a folder for each digital photographer and upload the pictures, then either when they have a full cd's worth or at the end of the week burn a cd.      

People shooting RAW on SLRs, it works out to about one or one-and-half CDs per dive (assuming the shooter fills a 1 GB card with 70-80 raw image files).

I take a laptop with me, and spend a lot of time burning CDs when I'm not underwater. If the liveaboard was to do this for everyone, they'd need to dedicate one crewperson (and several computers) working most of the day just to keep up. It might work for people shooting smaller JPEG files.

According to Frank, the owner/operator of the MV Spree here in the Gulf of Mexico, he plans to add an ethernet network with network attached storage to the vessel some time in the foreseeable future. Of course, you would still need your own laptop/other device to store the originals, but at least this would give another redundant storage spot for files during the trip. This is a relatively inexpensive option that I would hope to see other operators pick up on.

I'd love to see a boat load of divers fill up a little NAS device.

I bought my D70 4 months ago, and have collected 2400 frames for a total of 9GB, or so, of data. I have searched far and wide for a backup solution, and have come across a product that looks promising. It is "photo backup" from "on the go soft".

It is a DVD burner that reads raw files, spans multiple disks, and creates indexes. You don't need any special software to restore from backup. I found there were plenty of photo indexing products out there, but very few that offered integrated backup.

http://www.onthegosoft.com/

I just fitted myself out with 2 devices

1. iRiver PMP-140 which is a great little device which can play music, video and show images.

2. IBM Thinkpad X21: a fantastic, very light, little laptop with a 12" screen and a CF card slot for quick download of pictures. Can be bought 2nd hand from loads of places as its not exactly state of the art - but doesn't need to be to just store and view pictures.

Between the 2 this should give me the back-up that I need without being heavy or cumbersome. I could also take an external DVD burner but you've gotta stop somewhere right?

All these facilities on a liveaboard would seem to be a great idea - even if was just an external USB cd-burner.

I'm looking for a device to download to also, when on trips. I don't have a laptop and am not sure I want to carry one (With dive and camera gear I'm already to the limit on how much weight I want to lug around). The Roadstor sounds like it may be just the thing, but I don't know anyone who has tried it. I did read a good review on The Imaging Resource website.

The device reads most cards and burns to CD's. You can view images on a TV using supplied cables etc...

Anyone use one?

Kathy

Has anybody had any luck with dive shops or liveaboards offering hard drive storage then writing cd's of your pictures?

This would solve a lot of problems with carrying memory cards, other devices, or laptops on trips (we have enough to carry!)

Seriously most dive shops and liveaboards have computers, it wouldn't be very difficult or expensive for them to offer this. They could set up a folder for each digital photographer and upload the pictures, then either when they have a full cd's worth or at the end of the week burn a cd.

Just looked at the Epson P2000. A great device. A very clear and large LCD screen. CF slot; and 40 GB hard drive. Looked better than the flash trax and new Nikon coolwalker. I had them put one aside that I will probably get. Last trip I was on, apparently something was spilled on my laptop. It damage the circuit board so the the Firewire and USB ports would not work with any peripheral devices. Taught me the lesson that if you go on an expensive trip where you expect to shoot a lot them you need an independent download device. If you don't bring a laptop you probably need two of them.

It depends upon the purpose of your trip and how much you shoot. I figure on shooting at least 1 GB a day. Thus the need for backup download device. I was originally turned on to digital on a trip to Komodo. One guy was using digital. Shooting low res jpegs. I would run out of film on every dive while he continued to shoot. I missed some great shots. But near the end of the trip he dumped all his pictures and ended up with only the last days shooting. I had to send him a photo CD I made from scans of my slides. Film is no better. I have a friend with whom I went on a shark shoot to Australia. The lab back home ruined half of his images. I have had five rolls of film ruined by on boat film processors. (The other reason I went to digital.)

Hi Dave,

For a long long time I've been looking for a little device that does both image storage and image display. I want something that I can put on my desk like one of those old "Digital picture frames" that cost an arm and a leg.

This Epson P-2000 looks like what I want!

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/consume...no&oid=49164278

What did you think of the LCD screen? How many pixels are in the 3.8 inch LCD display? (edit, it's 640 x 480 according to the specs).

I wonder if they will do firmware upgrades to accomodate the new and changing RAW formats.

I'm about to buy myself a christmas present...:-)

Cheers

James

Screen is far and away better than I've seen on any device short of a Laptop. Specs. say that the ppi of the images default at 212. Very easy to zoom in and out and to scroll through an image. Can't say I've looked at all possibilities. They had the flash trax next to it and there is no comparison. One guy on the web said he prepared a slide show and uploaded it the P2000 and sets it up on his desk as a picture frame. Don't know about upgrades but it would seem logical that they would be available

I've been looking a long time as well and this one looks like a winner.

I purchased the Epson P2000 and used it last weekend on a three day trip. Worked great. Great Screen. One person had a Flashtrax and the P2000 puts it to shame.

An added benefit was that while everyone else spent there evenings staring at their laptops I was able to take it easy and relax.

The Pelican 1040 micro case fits the P2000 perfectly. I would say it is a must accessory for any diver that buys a P2000.

The P2000 will store images larger than 8.9 MB. But it will only display them as thumbnails; not full screen images. I read somewhere that firmware upgrades are possible.

As a drawback raw images cannot not be zoomed in, rotated, or shown in slide shows. The imbedded raw is displayed full screen though and they look great.

We are very paranoid about loosing images when on dive trips. Thanks to the luggage weight restrictions, it makes it tough to often take your laptop along. We have found a unit called the Apacer. It take all memory media in the side and burns directly to CD. There is a verification process too. We make two copies and then carry them seperately on the way home. Told you we were paranoid!! The unit can then be plugged into a TV and you can view your images from the CD before erasing them from the storage media. Even if we bring a laptop, we use the Apacer to burn the CDs. Hope this helps.

Jack and Sue Drafahl

www.jackandsuedrafahl.com

Hi Jack and Sue,

How does it handle a 2 gig card or any card greater than 700 megs?

Cheers

James

James,

If you are trying to put on more than the CD can handle, it does disk spanning where it divides the data over multiple CDs. We normally try to restrict our usage to one CD, but have tried this feature and it works well.

Jack and Sue

Hi everybody

I've been using a DigiMagic CD burner for the last year or so. It's been to Tenerife, Malta & Cuba (US & European voltages) and has worked every time. There's a car adapter as well.

http://www.digi-magic.com

Very simple operation - slide in a CD, pop in your memory card and press the button. I've used it with CompactFlash and an XD-CF adapter.

I don't know whether you can span disks - I haven't got a big enough card to find out.

It says you can burn multi-session disks (i.e. "burn" more than one card), but I haven't managed to get this to work. No biggy for me - I can copy from one card to another inside my 5050 to assemble a full card.

According to the website, they've got a DVD version on the way. Handy for those 3gb cards

I'm also wary about hard-disk based solutions (including laptops) - although the Epson looks quite sexy - particularly in transit. This was a simple, cheap solution that works for me.

Cheers,

Andy

(My first post - I've been lurking for a month or so. I'll do a proper introduction when I've got a gallery together - hopefully soon).

Has anybody had any experience with a Wolverine unit. They come in 20,30 & 40 GB sizes and are priced from $200-$300. Thanks.

CDs are fine for smaller resolution cameras. But once you hit the raw+jpg 8+ megapixel, a hard drive backup is probably more efficient. I carry a laptop with 100GB and a firewire/USB2 drive with another 100GB. So I have a full backup of the drive in the laptop. In the terrible event of a laptop bust, hopefully there'll be another laptop around to back up the files on the portable drive.

I can tell you for certain if someone spills a beer on your laptop it may suffer a catastrophic failure. In my case it wasn't my action that did this and the damage didn't show up until a following trip when the USB and FW ports stopped working. I got a little stand made by Targus that should hopefully greatly reduce the possibility of this happening again.

For this reason I will for now on bring an independent backup for my laptop. The Epson 2000 has already shown itself useful on a number of occasions that I wouldn't want to bring a laptop on.

I normally take 2 IPODs on every trip. One for me, one for my gf. Besides the music, there is plenty of space on the 60 gb models (ipod photo) for all my digital images (she takes slide image with an f100) that i take during a trip. I copy my photos from the laptop to the 2 ipods, and we travel with them in our own carry-on.

Cor

Stuart and I always take our laptops and a small Firelite to backup images. The product is made by SmartDisk and is the size of an iPod. You can purchase them with capacity up to 100GB. We do a quick edit in PSCS browser to get rid of junk before loading on the Firelite. We've both been on the road quite a bit lately and not had any problems. Stuart can also use his iPod but believe it or not - he has way too much music on it!!

Michele

Our solution looks a lot like Michele's.

Laptop is a diminutive Fujitsu P5010D (10.5" screen), this little guy has on-board card readers (CF,SD, etc.).

Images are saved on mirrored LaCie Mobile drives (we just upgraded the hard disks inside ours from 40Gb to 100Gb).

We do minimal edit on the road (hate to spend 2 hours at the computer at night in the tropics).

When doing land photography, we bring 5 X 1Gb cards with us and also the Archos Gmini 220. This little MP3 player/voice recorder/photo download unit has an on-board 20Gb hard drive. It is definitively not as attractive as the iPod as an MP3 player but it works well for photo transfer and does not need an adapter to read CF cards. It is smaller in size than the Apple icon (see http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/335/C2564/). We can do up to 11 full 1Gb card transfers before recharging the Gmini. Beware however that there have been some firmware issues with it. (We never experienced that problem)

If need be, we also burn images to CDs with the Fujitsu.

And who said that digital would save space... weight... time...

Michel Gilbert