Portable Wireless Mobile Storage | GTAMotorcycle.com

Portable Wireless Mobile Storage

ifiddles

Well-known member
Hello fellow bikers...needing some recommendations for a couple of long trips I am planning for this summer...I just picked up an action cam and have four 32GB micro sd cards to use for recording our daily trips...my question is, we're going away for two weeks on one of our trips and I don't want to have to buy more SD cards, so I was thinking of picking up a western digital wireless mobile storage unit like this one

https://www.amazon.ca/Passport-Wire...ital+my+passport+wireless+portable+hard+drive

from what I understand, I can use it to transfer my footage from my micro sd card (with the adapter which I have) to the unit itself without having to bring our laptop along...anyone use this or something similar that they can recommend?...TIA, Ivana
 
Seems overpriced for what it is...

During this trip, will you be staying at motels? If so you can pop your sd card in your cellphone and use the motel's wifi to upload the contents of the sd card somewhere then wipe the card.
 
Seems overpriced for what it is...

During this trip, will you be staying at motels? If so you can pop your sd card in your cellphone and use the motel's wifi to upload the contents of the sd card somewhere then wipe the card.

Yes, we'll be staying in hotels/motels/bed & breakfasts...I am not tech savvy so how do I do this?...where would I upload the contents of the sd card to?...
 
SD cards to a Western Digital drive is what i do when I have a lot of photo files, similar to the one you linked @ifiddles, its a stand alone unit, SD card goes in the slot and the magic happens.
Never used it for video but imagine its the same.

Some of the places we travel , we know we may never be back so I want a secure transfer, not a wifi cloud pass so when i come home i find the glitch.
 
I have a Hyperdrive HD80 that I have used for years. It works well. It has been on many trips and backed up cards as they came out of the camera in my wedding shooting days. It is very obsolete at this point though. When I bought it, for the price of 16 gigs in memory cards I could get the 120 gig Hyperdrive. I haven't tried it with 32 GB cards. Backups take 1 to 2 minutes per gig (great at the time, not so great now).

If the video is important to you I would put it on two drives. You are putting your memories onto relatively fragile storage, erasing the durable storage, then bouncing it around for weeks.

On a personal note, coming home to a ton of video to edit wouldn't be fun for me. I have taken up to 30,000 pictures on a trip and it took me a lot of time to process them all when I got back. If you can take a small laptop and do rough edits during downtime, it provides a redundant backup and eases the burden when you return. You will want to dump most of the footage anyway, might as well do it daily.
 
Get an eye-fi SD card. You can set it up so it automatically wirelessly uploads to a tablet or other device and then when you're connected to wi fi it will upload to Flickr or wherever else you want to send your pics.

The way I have it set up I can see the pics on my iPad hi res screen immediately and do editing there if need be and then when in a WiFi spot the pics get sent to Flickr.

you can also set it up so it deletes the photos from the sd card once transferred so you never run out of memory space.

edit 2. I forgot, I also have it set up to automatically save pics on the card to my network connected hard drive. So they are saved to 3 places for me.
 
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Get an eye-fi SD card. You can set it up so it automatically wirelessly uploads to a tablet or other device and then when you're connected to wi fi it will upload to Flickr or wherever else you want to send your pics.

The way I have it set up I can see the pics on my iPad hi res screen immediately and do editing there if need be and then when in a WiFi spot the pics get sent to Flickr.

you can also set it up so it deletes the photos from the sd card once transferred so you never run out of memory space.

edit 2. I forgot, I also have it set up to automatically save pics on the card to my network connected hard drive. So they are saved to 3 places for me.

He is talking video from action cams. If he is running them off batteries, he doesn't have a chance, if they are plugged in and he has an android tablet with a huge SD card installed, it might work (until he fills the tablet which won't take long).
 
The WD route sounds good, unless you want to bring a laptop with you, or buy multiple SD cards and swap them out when full. Arguably though, if I were you, I'd probably bring a small laptop (I have an older one that fits in the tailbag/tankbag) as I'd want it with me to keep in touch/use in the evenings. It could also be used to review footage and hopefully dump the 'crap' and maybe trim the clips I want to keep, to cut down on reviewing days of footage when I get back. I also have a few portable 2.5" drives, which could fill the role of storage for the duration.

To those saying to upload 'to the cloud'...this is 1080P (or better) video. I'm not sure what cloud services and upload speeds people have here, but if you had to upload a 32GB card 10 times that's 320GB of storage. Uploading some pictures off a cell phone is one thing...uploading raw, high bitrate video is a totally different story.

For reference, every 20-30 minutes recorded at 1080P is likely around 4GB in size...so you'd fill a 32GB card every 160-240 minutes or 2.6-4 hours. Bringing storage with you in the form of cards, laptop, drive, etc (and extra batteries for the camera) is the only viable option.

Also keep in mind if going the WD route, that is a spinning hard disk and not a SSD/flash memory...meaning it is somewhat sensitive to vibration when off, and very when on/active. Only mentioning this so it gets packed accordingly, as better safe than sorry (eg. wrapping it or packing it with clothes vs throwing it in with tools or something).
 
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Seems overpriced for what it is...

During this trip, will you be staying at motels? If so you can pop your sd card in your cellphone and use the motel's wifi to upload the contents of the sd card somewhere then wipe the card.

I wouldn't bet on being able to do this. On my own road trips hotel wifi has ranged from "okay" to "miserable" to "actually broken and the concierge won't let me fix it"
 
Again, things like the eye-fi might work well for a DSLR, but comparing that to a high bitrate action camera is apples to oranges. Also, eye-fi is SD only whereas every action camera uses MicroSD...so even from a physical standpoint it wouldn't work. Note you could still use the WD device, as all you would need to do is put the MicroSD card into a MicroSD to SD adapter (which typically comes with every MicroSD card).

Even if the physical bit did work...assuming the card could transmit at 1.3Gbps (wireless AC speeds) it would take over 3 hours to upload an entire SD card, assuming you even had 32GB of cloud storage to hold it. Also chances are the cards run at a MUCH slower speed and wireless spec, so not a good option when you are talking about applications like this. Not to mention you'd be using it to link wirelessly to a cell phone, which would both limit the speed and be using up mobile data at the same time.
 
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