I'm going to Latin America for the month of March, and I don't know what to do with my photos. Does anyone out there have any advice they'd like to share?
For the gearheads out there, here are my constraints.
First of all, I'm trying to travel reasonably light--I'll only be backpacking a little, but I will be schlepping luggage a lot, and I don't want to lug a laptop. Second, I probably won't have to go more than two or three days without a wall socket for charging.
Wolverine Data's $370 ESP 5000 has a 120GB drive and can show raw image files.
(Credit: Wolverine Data)I'm guessing I'll need about 100GB of capacity. I'll be shooting raw images with an SLR (single-lens reflex), and there should be some mighty scenic spots. On two weeks in Ireland last year, I shot about 30GB of files, winnowing lightly as I went. So here are my options as I see it.
• Option 1 is a portable hard drive with a flash card reader and display.
I've been trying Wolverine Data's ESP 5000, a 40GB model with a screen. I like its ability to review raw images as well as JPEGs, and its battery power seems sufficient for my needs. And I like these for giving impromptu slideshows.
But I found the user interface clunky, and its raw image quality isn't always enough to check focus quality, even with the latest firmware. A 100GB model costs $370.
Anybody have any experience with the Epson P-5000 or similar products? They're even more expensive--an 80GB version costs nearly $700!
One advantage of these devices is that I could also use them to play video and music files and collect photos from others' digital cameras while I'm traveling.
• Option 2 is a hard drive without the fancy display. Wolverine's 120GB FlashPac costs $140. I'd have to rely on the camera for weeding out the dud shots, which probably is OK, but this is definitely the minimum-thrill approach.
And how reliable are hard drives anyway? My photos are precious, but I can say right now I'm not going to carry a second drive for backup.
• Option 3 is a bunch of CompactFlash cards. I have 16GB so far, but getting up to 100GB would cost something like $400 more even if I didn't pay for premium brands like SanDisk or Lexar. Watching the ever-dropping prices on flash memory cards would be depressing, though.
Flash cards have a lot to recommend them, though: are pretty durable, reliable, lightweight, and don't require batteries.
• Option 4 is whatever options readers are about to tell me about. I welcome your thoughts in the TalkBack section below or by e-mail to stephen.shankland@cnet.com.
Zmanda, a company commercializing the open-source Amanda backup software, announced a partnership by which customers can store their data at Amazon.com's S3--the online Simple Storage Service.
The partnership spotlights the growing influence of Amazon's S3, which provides customers with online storage whose costs are tied to the amount of storage needed. It's one of several online services Amazon offers.
Amanda (Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver--a contrived acronym if ever there was one) has been around for years; Zmanda was founded in 2005 as a provider of commercial support. There are several others, too.
Open-source software start-up Cleversafe has a new twist on an ages-old warning not to put all your eggs in one basket.
If it were up to the Chicago-based company, you'd protect your data by putting slices of your eggs in multiple baskets scattered across the globe.
In the earlier version of the company's software, you could reconstruct your entire egg collection even if five of eleven baskets were destroyed in earthquakes, swamped by tsunamis, consumed in an overheated data center inferno or otherwise lost. A new version released Tuesday, though, lets users choose their own egg slice and basket settings, which means they can emphasize storage economy or higher reliability.
Cleversafe's technology is called dispersed storage. The company develops open-source software under the General Public License (GPL) that enables the approach and sells hardware that lets customers implement the concept. The promise of the technology is that you get the benefits of numerous backup sites without the expense of reproducing the entire data set at each site, said Russ Kennedy, the company's newly hired vice president of marketing.
"Slicing and dispersing information vs. copying it two, three or four times--the raw economics between those two approaches is significant," Kennedy said.
However, dispersed storage doesn't show cost savings for smaller-scale archiving needs, he added. "If it's under 100 terabytes, it's probably not as interesting. If you're above, you're talking real money, especially compared with triple replication."
Another limitation is the time lag of storing the data, which is long enough that dispersed storage today is good only for archiving. Kennedy said the company plans to enable new uses in a future release that works faster and with larger amounts of data. "We're working very diligently on a next release, which is going to allow dispersed storage networks to expand from a scalability and capacity perspective and also from a performance perspective."
The latest version of Cleversafe--numbered 0.74 internally, and the 15th major update--now supports a storage networking standard called iSCSI. That technology lets a computer store data over the Internet as if it were communicating with a local hard drive.
"Most organizations today have access to operating systems that talk iSCSI. Therefore we chose that interface so it would be easier for customers to connect to the platform," Kennedy said.
The company also launched a new Cleversafe.org Web site for the open-source aspects of its business. The hope is to encourage outside programmers to participate.
"This is really the first release where we're seeking to have the community extend it. It's like a foundation," Kennedy said.
Cleversafe, founded in November 2004, has 35 employees and has gone through an angel investment round and a venture capital funding round.
Jobo's 200GB Giga One Ultra portable photo backup device.
(Credit: Jobo)Jobo on Monday announced the Giga One Ultra device, a portable hard drive for backing up photos in the field. That's a notch more spacious than the 120GB of the Giga One predecessor or the Spectator device, which unlike the Giga One devices have a color screen.
The drives have slots for a variety of flash memory modules, including CompactFlash, SD and SDHC, Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro. Photographers can back up their data while on the road, an idea that's especially useful if you're running out of flash card space.
The new models can download data from flash cards more than twice the speed of the Giga One, Gummersbach, Germany-based Jobo said.
The Giga One Ultra is scheduled to arrive at the end of October with capacities of 40GB, 80GB, 120GB and 200GB and prices of $149, $199, $229 and $329, respectively.
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