Storage on the go

[jgl51]

I have a Go Pro Hero 4 and am looking to the best way to store videos when traveling (in remote areas) for several weeks WITHOUT a PC.
Solutions would be for example:
- Take one SD card per day!!
- Download to Ipad and then to iCloud or Dropbox
- or ??

My criteria are:
- Very easy to do
- Minimum amount of additional equipment
- Reliable

Thanks in advance for your feedback

 

[tursiops]

Multiple SD cards. Satisfies all 3 of your criteria. Nothing else does. It is also the most reliable, robust and secure, and possibly the cheapest, depending on your Internet access.

 

[jgl51]

Thanks. No Internet access for at least two weeks of diving.

 

[Nagel616]

I've been planning to do something similar. Heading to Utila for the month of January and don't want to drag along a laptop.

So, with an external hard drive, an OTG cable (On The Go Cable), and my phone (Samsung Galaxy S5) I can back up all my video daily, without a laptop.

The OTG cable allows you to access most external USB devices (flash sticks, mouse, keyboard) on your phone. After you download a free file manager app for your phone, you merely plug in the OTG cable and Hard drive, pull the MicroSD card out of the gopro and put it in your phone, and copy from the card to the attached hard drive. I actually plugged a small hub into my OTG cable, and was able to use an external keyboard, mouse AND hard drive on the phone at the same time..

One word of advice is your hard drive needs to be formatted as exFAT (not NTFS, unless you want to buy a third party app that will let you read the windows file system on an NTFS drive). ExFAT will be recognized by windows just like an NTFS (but Microsoft won't let Android near NTFS, its a proprietary file system for MS Windows). Android will not recognize NTFS, but will recognize an ExFAT drive..

If you have an existing NTFS formatted drive, the plugin for an Android phone to recognize it is rather cheap (But I haven't gone this route)

 

[toozler]

I've been planning to do something similar. Heading to Utila for the month of January and don't want to drag along a laptop. So, with an external hard drive, an OTG cable (On The Go Cable), and my phone (Samsung Galaxy S5) I can back up all my video daily, without a laptop. The OTG cable allows you to access most external USB devices (flash sticks, mouse, keyboard) on your phone. After you download a free file manager app for your phone, you merely plug in the OTG cable and Hard drive, pull the MicroSD card out of the gopro and put it in your phone, and copy from the card to the attached hard drive. I actually plugged a small hub into my OTG cable, and was able to use an external keyboard, mouse AND hard drive on the phone at the same time.. One word of advice is your hard drive needs to be formatted as exFAT (not NTFS, unless you want to buy a third party app that will let you read the windows file system on an NTFS drive). ExFAT will be recognized by windows just like an NTFS (but Microsoft won't let Android near NTFS, its a proprietary file system for MS Windows). Android will not recognize NTFS, but will recognize an ExFAT drive.. If you have an existing NTFS formatted drive, the plugin for an Android phone to recognize it is rather cheap (But I haven't gone this route)

The phone's USB port probably won't have power to feed an external hard drive. You might need a powered USB hub or a drive that is powered on an outlet (usually the not-so-compact models). MicroSD's prices are just so low now ($11 for a 32gb samsung card) that a small card reader might be a better option than an external HD - unless you need hundreds of gigabytes.

 

[JohnnyC]

Grab something like one of these.

Dump your memory cards to it, and when you get home plug it into your laptop and it'll act as if you had one giant memory card. Make sure you are not using the same file name though.

Stand Alone Data Storage

 

[bowlofpetunias]

I've opted for multiple SD cards and SD card reader.

 

[Nagel616]

The phone's USB port probably won't have power to feed an external hard drive.

You are very much correct, depending on the type of portable hard drive you have. Being a tech geek, I have dozens of enclosures that are self powered so while that's not much of an issue to me now, I still noted it..

The OTG cable I got is found here, and can power a drive if need be with external power (plug from the phones wall charger works).

As for microSD cards, I have had issues with lower quality cards losing footage (many years of helmet cams while racing), I no longer buy cheap cards. Only Lexar or Sandisk for me since then. My GF bought a 128G "cheap" card, and I figured I would try it in my GoPro in Cozumel this past September, problem was it locked up 5 mins into a dive. I reset the camera, and thought it was recording, only to find 3g and 5g file sizes that were just garbage. Used my 64G Sandisk card for the rest of the trip and dumped to my GF's laptop nightly. And the worst place a card can fail is when you are underwater because there's not much you can do then

Oh and I came back with 60 gigs of footage from just a week of diving.. And I was only shooting 1080 / 60FPS.

Johnny - Those backup devices DO look tempting.. Price is the only thing that scares me away though, considering the cost of a regular 1TB external vs them.. They triple the price just to add a reader and firmware

 

[JohnnyC]

Johnny - Those backup devices DO look tempting.. Price is the only thing that scares me away though, considering the cost of a regular 1TB external vs them.. They triple the price just to add a reader and firmware

Yes, agree, although some you can just buy the enclosure and add your own hard drive on the cheap.

The problem is that cobbled together solutions like cables to hard drives through phones may or may not work at all, let alone well. These are made for professional photographers, so as a reliable, turnkey solution they are the best choice. Being made for professional photographers, they are also not cheap. You definitely pay for the convenience of having a reliable all-in-one solution without having to ghetto rig something together.

 

[KenGordon]

I have used one of these MobileLite Wireless G2 extends tablet/phone storage | Kingston Technology with an iPad and a 2Tb drive. I haven't used it recently - I am planning on taking a laptop on my next trip - and the software was rubbish.

The 'workflow' is: connect HD by usb to the device, plug micro SD card into it, use app on iPad to copy your GoPro stuff for the day. Go to dinner. Come back from dinner, press retry a few times, go to sleep, get up in the middle of the night, press retry, have it tell you the file already exists, press skip. Fail to sleep wondering if the video was really copied.

Maybe they have fixed the software now...