For the most part I come home from a shoot and dump the images from the CF cards onto the computer and then do my backups. Once in a while I am gone for a weekend without the benefit of a laptop and I want to make sure I have my CF cards backed up every night. For this reason I picked up a Wolverine Flashpac several years ago and have been using it ever since. Since you should always make backups as soon as possible, I can’t recommend some type of device like this enough.

Continue reading to learn more about remote backup devices…

Some newer units from Wolverine and companies like Epson even feature screens for viewing your images and allowing you to use a much larger screen for checking to see if you want to delete those images or not. My older Flashpac unit simply has a basic LCD that gives me the status of the current copy operation. Since this device is an older unit, it isn’t very fast, taking about 10 minutes to copy a 1gb CF card, but since for me, this is a single purpose device – used only for backing up cards in the field, it serves its purpose quite well.

Like many other devices, my unit has an internal laptop hard drive and an on-board battery that is charged through the USB port on the device. Most devices like this can handle a number of different card types, although I only use CF cards it is nice to know the others are there if I need to backup files from someone else’s camera.

What really got me to write an article about this topic was because the hard drive in mine died this weekend, fortunately I was able to replace the drive with a new one and use a tool from Wolverine to format it properly. I was going to send it with my daughter on a weekend trip for her backups. As soon as I realized I now longer had it available I had to immediately work on a replacement. Even though it doesn’t get used very often, it does have its place in the camera bag and is used often enough that I didn’t want to go without on.

If you are ever going to be away from your computer for a day or so, these types of devices are well worth the investment. With prices ranging from around $99 to upwards of $400, there is a device available to fit your needs and your budget.

The main point here is that you should make sure you have a backup solution in place and use it, the sooner you have two copies of your images, the safer you are and these remote backup devices give you that piece of mind.

Device Used: Wolverine FlashPac
Website: http://www.wolverinedata.com
Author: Kerry Garrison

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