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Portable Backup

Take back photos from Big Tech in 2023

I’m guessing you took thousands, if not more, of photos and videos in 2022, because with a smartphone in our pockets, it was just so easy to do.

And like most people, if you thought about backup at all, you did what was easiest. You signed up for the automatic backup programs on Apple and Google, which made copies of the photos and videos on your phone, and placed them into the “cloud” for a monthly fee.

But as we talked about several times in 2022, what if Apple or Google stopped liking you? What if the companies, rightly or wrongly, decided you violated their terms of services and locked you out of your account? (Read this blockbuster piece in the New York Times for more about how this actually keeps happening.) What if you suddenly died, and forgot to leave your password behind for loved ones? All your photos would be unavailable to future generations and lost forever. (Please take a minute RIGHT NOW and share your digital photo passwords with loved ones!)

New Year’s project: Make 2023 the year you took back your digital footprint and control of your images. How to do that? Thanks for asking. I have several ideas.

How to get your photos and videos backed up so you don’t lose them forever

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Backing up is always a hotly debated topic. Even just whether to back up or not is often a cause of conflict in a lot of social media photography groups. And even if you have chosen to backup your work, you’ll see three million responses describing exactly how you should back everything up in order to ensure you never lose anything – and they’ll all be different. Ultimately, everybody has the workflow that works best for them.

But what will work best for you? If you’re just thinking about backing up your photos and video, or even if you do already but you want to learn more about other backup technologies, this video from Gordon Laing will set you off on the right foot. In it, he talks about a whole bunch of different backup options along with the pros and potential cons of each.

Plugable enters the SSD market with 1TB and 2TB 2,400MB/sec Thunderbolt 3 NVMe drives

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Fast portable SSD storage has really kicked off over the last year or two. We’ve seen Samsung, G-Technology, Glyph and more releasing SSDs offering some pretty crazy transfer speeds. Now, Plugable has joined entered the fray with Thunderbolt 3 1TB and 2TB NVMe SSD options offering up to 2,400MB/sec read and up to 1,800MB/sec write.

The Glyph Atom Pro is the fastest portable SSD in the world

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The demands placed on portable storage are higher now than they ever were, especially for creatives working in photo and video. We need larger capacities and faster speeds to be able to keep up with those huge raw files and 4K and larger footage. Glyph’s new Atom Pro SSD claims to be the fastest portable SSD out there, offering sustained read and write speeds of 2,800MB/sec and 2,600MB/sec respectively.

We caught up with Glyph at IBC 2019 to find out more about the Atom Pro, and some of the other storage products they were showing off.

Backup in the field to Seagate’s new 5TB drive, the largest portable hard drive ever

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With higher megapixel cameras and 4K footage becoming the norm, Raw files and videos are taking up more space than ever before. Large capacity memory cards are cheap enough that you can afford to buy a bunch to keep you going all day. If you own a camera with a dual card slot, then you can shoot your stills backups as you go, but video tends to only save to one card. It’s a lot of data to risk.

Seagate have announced that its popular Backup Plus Portable line of external drives now comes in a 5TB flavour. The company claims that this makes it the world’s highest capacity 2.5 portable hard drive. Based around the same technology as their recently released 5TB BarraCuda hard drive, it fits a lot of data into an even smaller package.

Finally there’s a small affordable backup solution for use in the field

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I say “finally”, there used to be a number of them. Back when I shot a pair of D100 bodies back in 2002, I used a 20GB Super Digibin 2 to backup my massive 128MB CompactFlash cards while still out shooting. It was slow and the battery didn’t last very long, but it was reliable and it worked. It allowed me to backup or unload my cards before I got anywhere close to home.

In recent years, such inexpensive and readily available backup solutions seem to have disappeared. There are a few out there, but many are either way out of most budgets, offer very little in the way of user experience, or just aren’t very good. New startup DFi Gear is looking to change that with the Flash Porter. It’s basically a hard drive (or SSD) in a small case with CF, SD and microSD card readers and a great big LCD screen to back up while you’re out and about.

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