Memory cards reliable enough?

On 2015-07-14 23:39:09 +0000, PeterN said:

On 7/14/2015 2:33 PM, PAS wrote:
"Savageduck" wrote in message
news:2015071207534598521-savageduck1@REMOVESPAMmecom...
On 2015-07-12 12:59:17 +0000, Alan Browne
said:
On 2015-07-11 16:01, Alfred Molon wrote:
In the past it used to be so that you could not trust memory cards, so
you would not use too large sizes, to avoid losing all images in
case of
a malfunction. But I get the impression that nowadays memory cards are
very reliable, so you could in principle put a 256GB memory card into
the camera, and only use that for an entire trip. Any thoughts about
this?


I don't recall them being considered unreliable. Indeed we all cried
the chorus of better to get solid state memory than the small
spinning mass disks that were cheaper (and far as I can tell no
longer marketed).

There are all sorts of stories of lost cameras found years later with
all the data intact. Indeed a recent camera was fished out of a lake
6 years after it was lost and all the photos were retrieved and the
owner eventually located.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manito...ipeg-1.3136501

Then

there was this one.
http://www.cnet.com/news/google-reunites-lost-waterlogged-camera-owner/

That said, any electronics can fail. I bring a laptop and offload
images to the laptop as I go. There are other solutions as well that
include data tanks and uploading images to a "cloud" account on the fly.

You can even operate your own 'cloud' drive at home and send the
images there.

The trouble of course, on the road, is getting sufficiently high
bandwidth connections to the net. In some places it's hard to get
something that can reliably and quickly take off the 5 - 10 GB+ of
images one can easily shoot in a day.

This has been my travel fail safe redundant storage. It does full and
incremental backups.
http://www.hypershop.com/HyperDrive/HDU2-000.html


When I became interested in photography and got my first DSLR, a 256MB
card cost around $80.00 and would hold about 32 RAW images from camera.
I bought a Tripper with a 30GB hard drive to use to off-load my files
once the memory card was full, I carried it around with me.

http://photo.net/equipment/digital/tripper/

The cost of the thing would have bought me three additional 256MB cards
but the Tripper holds 30GB which was large at the time. I was a newbie
so wasn't considering backing up my files "in the field", just
off-loading the files so I could use the memory card again. The Tripper
still works too. I haven't used it in some time and found some of my
original images that I took still on there. I think that a 1TB device
that can transfer at USB 3 speeds would be nice to have.


Portable WD and Seagate USB3 2Tb drives sell for about $90, lse if you
buy several. The 1TB drives cost about $60.

Yup! However, with the ColorSpace UDMA or UDMA2 all you have to do is
insert your CF or SDHC card and do a full or incremental backup. No
computer required. Let's see you do that in the field with an external
USB3 HDD.


--
Regards,

Savageduck

rOn Tue, 14 Jul 2015 16:47:17 -0700, Bill W
wrote:

On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 19:32:36 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Bill W
wrote:

That also happened to me - no support for an older enclosure. I was
able to work around that one.

what interface was it?
was the workaround a new enclosure or something else?

It was actually an adapter, which should have been even better -
Vantec NexStar. IDE, SATA, card reader - everything. But it won't work
with 64 bit Win 8.1, and that's that. I was cloning a hard drive, and
I just ended up plugging it into the computer I was cloning. I realize
this has risks, and I didn't want to do it that way, but I ran out of
patience. I got lucky, and everything worked fine. I'll buy a new
adapter next time.

why won't it work with win81?
assuming it's usb, isn't it a standard usb mass storage device?

Good question. It is USB, and I believe class compliant, but the
computer would never recognize the drive. I don't remember ever having
to install drivers for it. I think it's a firmware problem.

if it required custom drivers, it's junk out of the box.

I talked to the mfr., and there is no support for this adapter with
Win 8.1-64, and no drivers, no firmware update. Junk is exactly what I
think of it. I've never been too impressed with Vantec, but that's
what was available when I needed one. No more, if I can avoid them.

It seems to be a problem of some kind in Windows. I have had related
problems with a 2TB Western Digital on W64 Pro.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

On 7/14/2015 7:51 PM, Bill W wrote:
On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 19:44:48 -0400, PeterN
wrote:

On 7/14/2015 5:12 PM, Bill W wrote:
On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 16:57:58 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Bill W
wrote:

Be very grateful. I recently dug an old Zip drive out, and it took me
3 days of research to find out how to get the old files off of it. I
have learned it is not a good idea to backup and forget.

other than finding a functioning zip drive, what else is there?

I had the Zip drive, it's the functioning part that was hard. It was
an early parallel port drive, and there is zero support for those on
Win 8.1. I realized at one point that I still had a Win 98 laptop
lying about, but it still took a lot of research, and some obscure
tweaks. Running in compatibility mode was not the usual simple remedy.

If nothing else, there are companies out there that can recover backup
files going way back in time, even to DOS. No one wants to install Win
ME or 95 on a computer just to get old files, especially when you're
not sure that there's anything in the backups that you don't already
have elsewhere. Organization really is all it's cracked up to be. And
organizing things, including all my computer files is one project I
finally started, but it's also the project that's kept me from
anything remotely related to photography for weeks.

Whatever floats your boat. ;-p

It's driving me up the wall. I feel like throwing everything out the
window, and starting over.


I know the feeling. We got a new frigde and the thru the door icemaker
jammed. I just got into a mode and spent a lot of time trying to unjam
it. I finally called for warranty service. It took a few minutes to
replace a defective part.

--
PeterN

On 7/14/2015 8:08 PM, Savageduck wrote:
On 2015-07-14 23:39:09 +0000, PeterN said:

On 7/14/2015 2:33 PM, PAS wrote:
"Savageduck" wrote in message
news:2015071207534598521-savageduck1@REMOVESPAMmecom...
On 2015-07-12 12:59:17 +0000, Alan Browne
said:
On 2015-07-11 16:01, Alfred Molon wrote:
In the past it used to be so that you could not trust memory
cards, so
you would not use too large sizes, to avoid losing all images in
case of
a malfunction. But I get the impression that nowadays memory cards
are
very reliable, so you could in principle put a 256GB memory card into
the camera, and only use that for an entire trip. Any thoughts about
this?


I don't recall them being considered unreliable. Indeed we all cried
the chorus of better to get solid state memory than the small
spinning mass disks that were cheaper (and far as I can tell no
longer marketed).

There are all sorts of stories of lost cameras found years later with
all the data intact. Indeed a recent camera was fished out of a lake
6 years after it was lost and all the photos were retrieved and the
owner eventually located.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manito...ipeg-1.3136501


Then

there was this one.
http://www.cnet.com/news/google-reunites-lost-waterlogged-camera-owner/


That said, any electronics can fail. I bring a laptop and offload
images to the laptop as I go. There are other solutions as well that
include data tanks and uploading images to a "cloud" account on the
fly.

You can even operate your own 'cloud' drive at home and send the
images there.

The trouble of course, on the road, is getting sufficiently high
bandwidth connections to the net. In some places it's hard to get
something that can reliably and quickly take off the 5 - 10 GB+ of
images one can easily shoot in a day.

This has been my travel fail safe redundant storage. It does full and
incremental backups.
http://www.hypershop.com/HyperDrive/HDU2-000.html


When I became interested in photography and got my first DSLR, a 256MB
card cost around $80.00 and would hold about 32 RAW images from camera.
I bought a Tripper with a 30GB hard drive to use to off-load my files
once the memory card was full, I carried it around with me.

http://photo.net/equipment/digital/tripper/

The cost of the thing would have bought me three additional 256MB cards
but the Tripper holds 30GB which was large at the time. I was a newbie
so wasn't considering backing up my files "in the field", just
off-loading the files so I could use the memory card again. The Tripper
still works too. I haven't used it in some time and found some of my
original images that I took still on there. I think that a 1TB device
that can transfer at USB 3 speeds would be nice to have.


Portable WD and Seagate USB3 2Tb drives sell for about $90, lse if you
buy several. The 1TB drives cost about $60.

Yup! However, with the ColorSpace UDMA or UDMA2 all you have to do is
insert your CF or SDHC card and do a full or incremental backup. No
computer required. Let's see you do that in the field with an external
USB3 HDD.



Yup. You have not yet reached the age where 8oz in your bag makes a
difference.


--
PeterN

On 2015-07-15 01:03:20 +0000, PeterN said:

On 7/14/2015 8:08 PM, Savageduck wrote:
On 2015-07-14 23:39:09 +0000, PeterN said:
On 7/14/2015 2:33 PM, PAS wrote:
"Savageduck" wrote in message
news:2015071207534598521-savageduck1@REMOVESPAMmecom...
On 2015-07-12 12:59:17 +0000, Alan Browne
said:
On 2015-07-11 16:01, Alfred Molon wrote:
In the past it used to be so that you could not trust memory
cards, so
you would not use too large sizes, to avoid losing all images in
case of
a malfunction. But I get the impression that nowadays memory cards
are
very reliable, so you could in principle put a 256GB memory card into
the camera, and only use that for an entire trip. Any thoughts about
this?


I don't recall them being considered unreliable. Indeed we all cried
the chorus of better to get solid state memory than the small
spinning mass disks that were cheaper (and far as I can tell no
longer marketed).

There are all sorts of stories of lost cameras found years later with
all the data intact. Indeed a recent camera was fished out of a lake
6 years after it was lost and all the photos were retrieved and the
owner eventually located.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manito...ipeg-1.3136501

Then

there was this one.
http://www.cnet.com/news/google-reunites-lost-waterlogged-camera-owner/


That said, any electronics can fail. I bring a laptop and offload
images to the laptop as I go. There are other solutions as well that
include data tanks and uploading images to a "cloud" account on the
fly.

You can even operate your own 'cloud' drive at home and send the
images there.

The trouble of course, on the road, is getting sufficiently high
bandwidth connections to the net. In some places it's hard to get
something that can reliably and quickly take off the 5 - 10 GB+ of
images one can easily shoot in a day.

This has been my travel fail safe redundant storage. It does full and
incremental backups.
http://www.hypershop.com/HyperDrive/HDU2-000.html

When I became interested in photography and got my first DSLR, a 256MB
card cost around $80.00 and would hold about 32 RAW images from camera.
I bought a Tripper with a 30GB hard drive to use to off-load my files
once the memory card was full, I carried it around with me.

http://photo.net/equipment/digital/tripper/

The cost of the thing would have bought me three additional 256MB cards
but the Tripper holds 30GB which was large at the time. I was a newbie
so wasn't considering backing up my files "in the field", just
off-loading the files so I could use the memory card again. The Tripper
still works too. I haven't used it in some time and found some of my
original images that I took still on there. I think that a 1TB device
that can transfer at USB 3 speeds would be nice to have.


Portable WD and Seagate USB3 2Tb drives sell for about $90, lse if you
buy several. The 1TB drives cost about $60.

Yup! However, with the ColorSpace UDMA or UDMA2 all you have to do is
insert your CF or SDHC card and do a full or incremental backup. No
computer required. Let's see you do that in the field with an external
USB3 HDD.

Yup. You have not yet reached the age where 8oz in your bag makes a difference.

I am the one in this room who actually reduced his load by buying into
a mirrorless system with my X-E2. You and Eric seem to be loading up
with fat cameras and fatter glass.


--
Regards,

Savageduck

On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 21:00:40 -0400, PeterN
wrote:

On 7/14/2015 7:51 PM, Bill W wrote:
On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 19:44:48 -0400, PeterN
wrote:

On 7/14/2015 5:12 PM, Bill W wrote:
On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 16:57:58 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Bill W
wrote:

Be very grateful. I recently dug an old Zip drive out, and it took me
3 days of research to find out how to get the old files off of it. I
have learned it is not a good idea to backup and forget.

other than finding a functioning zip drive, what else is there?

I had the Zip drive, it's the functioning part that was hard. It was
an early parallel port drive, and there is zero support for those on
Win 8.1. I realized at one point that I still had a Win 98 laptop
lying about, but it still took a lot of research, and some obscure
tweaks. Running in compatibility mode was not the usual simple remedy.

If nothing else, there are companies out there that can recover backup
files going way back in time, even to DOS. No one wants to install Win
ME or 95 on a computer just to get old files, especially when you're
not sure that there's anything in the backups that you don't already
have elsewhere. Organization really is all it's cracked up to be. And
organizing things, including all my computer files is one project I
finally started, but it's also the project that's kept me from
anything remotely related to photography for weeks.

Whatever floats your boat. ;-p

It's driving me up the wall. I feel like throwing everything out the
window, and starting over.


I know the feeling. We got a new frigde and the thru the door icemaker
jammed. I just got into a mode and spent a lot of time trying to unjam
it. I finally called for warranty service. It took a few minutes to
replace a defective part.

Worse yet. You did start over, and ended up with new problems. It
never ends, it seems.

On Wed, 15 Jul 2015 13:00:15 +1200, Eric Stevens
wrote:

rOn Tue, 14 Jul 2015 16:47:17 -0700, Bill W
wrote:

On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 19:32:36 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Bill W
wrote:

That also happened to me - no support for an older enclosure. I was
able to work around that one.

what interface was it?
was the workaround a new enclosure or something else?

It was actually an adapter, which should have been even better -
Vantec NexStar. IDE, SATA, card reader - everything. But it won't work
with 64 bit Win 8.1, and that's that. I was cloning a hard drive, and
I just ended up plugging it into the computer I was cloning. I realize
this has risks, and I didn't want to do it that way, but I ran out of
patience. I got lucky, and everything worked fine. I'll buy a new
adapter next time.

why won't it work with win81?
assuming it's usb, isn't it a standard usb mass storage device?

Good question. It is USB, and I believe class compliant, but the
computer would never recognize the drive. I don't remember ever having
to install drivers for it. I think it's a firmware problem.

if it required custom drivers, it's junk out of the box.

I talked to the mfr., and there is no support for this adapter with
Win 8.1-64, and no drivers, no firmware update. Junk is exactly what I
think of it. I've never been too impressed with Vantec, but that's
what was available when I needed one. No more, if I can avoid them.

It seems to be a problem of some kind in Windows. I have had related
problems with a 2TB Western Digital on W64 Pro.

I can't remember exactly what Vantec told me, but the rep did seem to
be implying that 64 bit was the main issue. I forced Win 8 onto two
computers that did not support it, including one with Win 7. I had
problems that did not make any sense at all. I think it's a
combination of firmware and drivers, and some coders who got careless.
On the Win 7 computer, the DVD drive would not work at all with Win 8,
and Toshiba never updated any drivers. I had to go online to find
generic drivers. It works fine now, but why should I have to do any
work to get it that way? And I've had continuing problems getting a
second display to work consistently on that laptop. I mean, how long
have they been at this stuff? Things are supposed to just work these
days.

I'm signed up for Win 10, but I'm starting to dread it.

In article , Bill W
wrote:

It seems to be a problem of some kind in Windows. I have had related
problems with a 2TB Western Digital on W64 Pro.

I can't remember exactly what Vantec told me, but the rep did seem to
be implying that 64 bit was the main issue.

the issue is that they wrote ****ty firmware and are not accepting the
blame.

I forced Win 8 onto two
computers that did not support it, including one with Win 7. I had
problems that did not make any sense at all. I think it's a
combination of firmware and drivers, and some coders who got careless.
On the Win 7 computer, the DVD drive would not work at all with Win 8,
and Toshiba never updated any drivers.

drivers for a dvd drive??

I had to go online to find
generic drivers. It works fine now, but why should I have to do any
work to get it that way?

because you're using oddball components.

And I've had continuing problems getting a
second display to work consistently on that laptop. I mean, how long
have they been at this stuff? Things are supposed to just work these
days.

they do.

I'm signed up for Win 10, but I'm starting to dread it.

it's not bad but it's still windows.

On 7/14/2015 9:22 PM, Bill W wrote:
On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 21:00:40 -0400, PeterN
wrote:

On 7/14/2015 7:51 PM, Bill W wrote:
On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 19:44:48 -0400, PeterN
wrote:

On 7/14/2015 5:12 PM, Bill W wrote:
On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 16:57:58 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Bill W
wrote:

Be very grateful. I recently dug an old Zip drive out, and it took me
3 days of research to find out how to get the old files off of it. I
have learned it is not a good idea to backup and forget.

other than finding a functioning zip drive, what else is there?

I had the Zip drive, it's the functioning part that was hard. It was
an early parallel port drive, and there is zero support for those on
Win 8.1. I realized at one point that I still had a Win 98 laptop
lying about, but it still took a lot of research, and some obscure
tweaks. Running in compatibility mode was not the usual simple remedy.

If nothing else, there are companies out there that can recover backup
files going way back in time, even to DOS. No one wants to install Win
ME or 95 on a computer just to get old files, especially when you're
not sure that there's anything in the backups that you don't already
have elsewhere. Organization really is all it's cracked up to be. And
organizing things, including all my computer files is one project I
finally started, but it's also the project that's kept me from
anything remotely related to photography for weeks.

Whatever floats your boat. ;-p

It's driving me up the wall. I feel like throwing everything out the
window, and starting over.


I know the feeling. We got a new frigde and the thru the door icemaker
jammed. I just got into a mode and spent a lot of time trying to unjam
it. I finally called for warranty service. It took a few minutes to
replace a defective part.

Worse yet. You did start over, and ended up with new problems. It
never ends, it seems.


Life certainly is interesting, isn't it.

--
PeterN

On 7/14/2015 9:30 PM, Bill W wrote:

snip


I'm signed up for Win 10, but I'm starting to dread it.


Just this afternoon I was talking to an MS beta tester/technician about
that very subject. He told me that he would not advise anyone to adapt
just yet, although he found no issues. (He and I know each other for
over 12 years.)


--
PeterN