Railfan Technology > Card Reader Recommendations

About a month ago, there was a discussion about storage and backup of photo and video files. Personally, I do not care to store or back up any of my personal files or information out there in cyberspace. Too many chances of it getting hacked into or whatever. The internet seems to become less and less secure every day. I use a couple of external drives for all my created and personal files. I plan to copy all my photo/video files to cd's and store them in different locations. Something I have put off too long. What I am currently planning is to copy files directly from memory cards (SDHC/SDXC) to cd's using a card reader, rather than having to use the cameras, and am looking for recommendations on card readers for this purpose. I have found a couple of readers at Adorama to consider, but would like some input from others here before I make a final decision. Some of the devices I am considering are Mobile Edge Universal USB 2.0 reader, Lexar Workflow Professional UR1, Sonnet DiO Pro CompactFlash and SDXC USB 3.0 Media Reader and Mobile Edge Universal All-in-One USB 2.0 Card Reader. I would like to stay within the $50 to 100 range. Do any of you have experience with these particular devices? Thanks in advance for your input.

Unless you have some burning desire to buy some high end SD card reader, just go find one with reasonably good reviews on Amazon.  Some of the more expensive ones are slightly faster (it makes a lot more difference, I've found, in the CF space), but I'd spent $15-20 and call it a day.

That said, I'd caution against using recordable CDs/DVDs/Blurays as long term backup media.  As they fall out of favor as removable storage, the quality of modern recordables has fallen a long way.  I've had some that are unreadable in the course of a year, even stored in a dark desk drawer in an air conditioned office.  When you figure how many gig of data most of us have these days, it's a whole lot of DVD-Rs anyway.  Personally I use a pair of external 4TB hard drives at the moment, taking one of the two home every weekend from the office and running a backup.  I then take it back on Monday, and the next Friday I bring home the other one.  That way, in the event that one is unrecoverable when I need a backup, at most I've lost two weeks. 

I wholeheartedly agree with you about the aversion to online backup services - my theory is there's no security that beats an unplugged drive in a locked drawer that's not in my house.  Plus there's little chance that the drive will declare bankruptcy over the weekend and all my data went "poof".

Agree with CD's being relatively temporary, seem to remember around 15 years. Industry is said to be moving to magnetic tape for approx 40 year spans, but that has many flaws as well. Low speed, low capacity and failure or technical extinction of read/write devices.

A number of folks have moved to duplicate discrete hard drives, Seagate for example, as described in the post above. The pocket sized devices have the advantage of fewer critical parts, no power supplies for example.

Another strategy is to use a hard drive or two and an on-line service. Theory says the two techniques are less likely to fail at the same time. Commercial on-line storage devices are usually replaced with new technology every few years and are intended to be well-maintained. But there's theories that defeat that as well.

^^^^^^
What he said!

Stay with the external HDs.  I have both my operating system SSD and 'storage' HD in slide bays, and irregularly clone them to identical drives purchased at the same time.  I use a USB external HD which contains all my HD files and 'major' folders on the SSD...like My Documents, MS Outlook folders, and favorites, etc.  The USB drive is kept at a friends place about 2 miles away, in case I come home to an empty or burned-down house.

I used to store all my images on gold (the material, not the color) CDs.  They have a life of 100 years.  They're more expensive and cost about $3 per CD.  I no longer do so because of the size of the RAW files from my Nikon D7000 meant I was getting too few images per CD.

KG

I recently purchased a 4TB external drive at Best Buy for approx. $120.00.  Walmart is carrying the 5TB Seagate HD for a similar price.  I take a lot of HD digital video which produces large files that I need to transfer off my laptop due to storage limitations.  I agree with everyone about cloud storage, I just don't trust it.  I back-up to two separate HD's just to be on the safe side, in case one crashes and I can't recover the files. 

For transferring from the camera's SD card, I use the internal SD reader on my Dell laptop and while it is not super fast, it works fine for my purposes. I would echo previous posts about not wasting money on an expensive SD card reader.  No matter how fast or high-speed and fancy the card reader is, your transfer rates will still be limited by the use of USB 2.0 cables and the transfer speed of the HD you are moving the files onto.  Hope this helps!

 

While I agree that the card reader need not be expensive, I must be missing something about the cloud storage.  I use Dropbox, Carbonite, Google, and SmugMug for various purposes, and have never really worried about reliability (especially compared to a hard drive).  Making the hard copies in external HDDs that you store offsite is valid, but eschewing the cloud seems too paranoid.  Are there any examples of online backup being hacked?  I've heard of the larger companies being hacked, but the backup sites?  Besides, if they did get hacked and my photos were accessed, I'm not sure how devastating that would be.  What are the actual risks of storing photos and videos in the cloud?  

Andre

I don't worry about online pictures being hacked, unless they destroy them. Even then they should be backed up. My concern is bankrupcy. Some of these outfits have gone under without warning and everything is lost. It is a good way to off-site back-up, but never trust someone to hold your data for you.

Scott Schifer
Torrance, CA
TinyTrains Website

I'm thinking Cloud for secondary back-up not the primary, which I would think should be in your direct posession / safe keeping. My opinion is there should be / could be encryption to use for the Cloud as well, I don't have a handle on that though.

Here's a similar discussion from a couple of months ago:Railfan Technology > Keeping up with storage Date: 01/24/15 22:05
Keeping up with storage
Author: webmaster

http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?9,3642490,3642686#msg-3642686

tinytrains Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't worry about online pictures being hacked,
> unless they destroy them. Even then they should be
> backed up. My concern is bankrupcy. Some of these
> outfits have gone under without warning and
> everything is lost. It is a good way to off-site
> back-up, but never trust someone to hold your data
> for you.

I use Dropbox, Google, and Carbonite in various ways.  Dropbox keeps a copy on my computer as well as the cloud, so if Dropbox went out of business my files will still be available to me locally.  Carbonite is just automatic backup of everything in my computer.  I have accidentally deleted a file and recovered it with Carbonite.  Google going out of business?  A sure sign of the Apocolypse in which case we'd have other concerns.  The chances of an external hard drive failing in some way is astronomically higher, not to mention the hassle of swapping a bunch of stuff and staying on top of the sync.  I have a couple of Western Digital network attached storage drives that have gone belly up, among other drives.  The only way I will lose data (if I'm looking at this right) is if my cloud backup goes dark without warning AND my locally stored files crap out simultaneously.  I have a box of tissues in case that happens...

Andre