Backing up a P2 card with a CF card

[davideo.net]

I'm not sure why I never tried this before, but on my PC laptop I just tried backing up a 32 gig P2 card to a 32 gig compact flash card (connected via an express 32 adapter) and it worked fine... there are times when I need to record all day and I don't have enough P2 cards, so I've been copying cards to the internal drive of the laptop, and then making another copy of the same P2 card to an external USB3 drive (via another express 32 card adapter.) Copying from P2 to fast CF (400x) cards seems really quick, and I already have a bunch of CF cards that I use with the Canon 5D MII. The only thing you have to do if you use Windows 7 is to disable the ReadyBoost mode on the CF card before copying (my laptop would automatically steal 2GB from the CF card for ReadyBoost, otherwise.) More info on ReadyBoost here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost

 

[GaryNattrass]

I wonder if a CF USB card reader would be seen as a USB device direct from the camera, I know USB sticks are no good as they are not fast enough but a CF card device could be a useful back-up device for cloning cards. Having said that I find my current workflow to low cost 160gb USB hard drives is very smooth and I can get up to four full cards per drive.

 

[Garion]

Interesting topic this, whereas USB2 is 480 Mega Bits per second this works out at roughly 40 Mega Bytes per second allowing for overheads etc.. Ive seen USB2 pen drives hitting 28 Mega Bytes per second on writes but the question would be are all pen drives compatable with our cams? I know when they came out some 3rd party usb2 hard drives didnt like our cams much. would be nice to offload to a pen drive if it didnt take too long

 

[GaryNattrass]

I tried a pen drive and I couldn't even format it with the camera, just tried a CF card in a USB reader and I could not format that either.