Archiving SD on the Go

Absolutely! ;) I believe the only thing the display on any of these things only serves to show you copying progress and battery level. My brother a stills photog has one that copies CF cards and it cost him around $600 and it can show him previews of his raw images.

I think for a device to play AVCHD files on the go you'd be looking at the $2000 price point ;)

All I want is a simple device to back up my SD cards while I'm out shooting weddings because things can get a little crazy on the day and over the years I have lost batteries, lens caps & cables.
 
I hope to receive my little SDHC store sometime next week and will be more than happy to give you the figures - once thing you can be certain of is that lots of smaller files will take longer to trasnfer than one big file - anyway we'll see ;)
 
I finally received my little DigiMate III :)

I temporarily installed an old 30GB laptop IDE hard drive in it and it works beautifully once you work out how to operate it from the badly translated English instruction manual. The unit is about the size of an iPod but a little bigger & thicker, the battery lasts about 2 hours and took a little over 40 minutes to copy a full 16GB SanDisk Ultra II SDHC card and can do so with the PSU plugged in as well, however, you still need to make sure you have enough cards on hand before relying on offloading and reusing.

It cost me about $35USD (inclusive of shipping from Hong Kong to Australia.) I'll probably buy another one if this unit proves to be reliable.
 
wow, thats great! can you put in any 2.5" hard drive? what about battery? is it a built-in and can you plug it into a USB port for charging or power?
 
Hey Longshanks,
1) This particular model only takes 2.5" IDE drives
2) It comes with a rechargeable Lithium Ion battery (easy access via a sliding door)
3) The unit can be charged via USB cable too
4) the case is made of a metal alloy which seems strong enough
5) It has a colour display about the size of the original iPods, it does not display file details, only disk partition sizes/available space and copy progress in terms of % completed

I still can't believe how darn cheap these things are, only time will prove their reliability - I'll tell you after 6 months of serious event use ;)
 
More possibilities.

Over this week I've been trying a mini acer one laptop that I recieved as a price for a video contest. This little beast wheighting no more than a 1-2lbs is a great way of backing up your cards on the go. As this is a windows xp loaded machine (you can either buy it with xp or linux) you can install mpc player and play not in realtime (even though sometimes it does) the files to check that everything is in the can. You also have the possibilitie of leave it transcoding if you can.

The specs of the pc are this:

1.6ghz intel atom processor with 1g ram. 110 gigs of free disk space.

I/O: two sd card slots, one of them works as an expansion slot (it makes your hard disk bigger by merging the card with the hard disk.). one vga out, wifi, ethernet connector and thre usb 2 connectors. EDIT: forget to say that it has a mic input, and headphone output (I know pretty standard, but you never know).

this isn't by any means an editing laptop, but you can use it to back up or even transcode your footage to dvchd pro while you ar shooting to other cards.
And you can always use the onboard webcam for video chats with the producer of your film that is in another country at that moment. You can also use the computer as a dvd player (even though it doesn't have a cd/dvd bay).

Price: I think that it is around 300-350$

well, that's it for now........and no, I'm not being paid by acer.........

BTW, if you have any questions just ask.
 
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I'm leaning toward the netbook route in case of emergency "oh my god, i ran outta SD space" for wedding video shoots. It's just peace of mind to SEE the footage has been backed up before formating your SD cards on the fly.
 
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