Using iPad for Image Backups

I’ve been trying to reduce the amount of gear I take on the road with me. On my last trip I took a Surface Pro 5 (core i5, 8gb RAM) for media consumption and backups. That didn’t go too well as as soon as it got cold it would shut down, I was in New Zealand and it was always cold so it was pretty much useless unless it was connected to mains power. Startrail shoots and long flights can get quite boring without anything to watch movies on.

Image Editing

The idea of having full Photoshop with me on the road sounded great, but the Surface is too underpowered to do any serious Photoshop work on D850 files, so the only thing it was good for was backing up to external drives when I was in a motel. I like windows as a desktop OS but it’s not very good on a mobile device.

Adobe recently released a Photoshop app for the ipad, unfortunately it’s missing a bunch of important features and is pretty much useless in it’s current form. The best option right now for editing on the iPad is Affinity Photo by Serif. If you’re a Photoshop user it takes a while to learn the new interface & layout but it has pretty much everything I need for serious editing (I did try stacking a startrail but that didn’t go too well).

Having said that I still prefer to wait until I get home and edit on a big monitor but it’s good to have a mobile option.

Image Backups

With IOS13/iPadOS there is support for external storage devices and a file manager app, and the lightning port has been replaced by a USB-C port which can power external drives and other accessories.

I always have 2 cards in the D850, an XQD and an SD, both 64gb running in backup mode. When the cards are full the SD is put in a memory card wallet (I have one for empty cards and another for full cards) in my camera bag.

I use the Apple USB-A to USB-C dongle to connect my XQD card reader to the iPad, then using the files app I transfer the contents of the card to the iPad’s internal storage. Once that is done I remove the XQD reader and connect a Samsung T5 SSD, and transfer the copied files to that. The SSD stays somewhere other than my camera bag, either in the car or motel. I repeat the process with a second T5 SSD, which stays in my camera bag. It’s possible to use a USB hub and copy the files from the XQD directly to the SSD, I don’t use a hub as I have plenty of empty space on the iPad and it only adds a few minutes to the process.

I have 5 x 64gb XQD cards and 20 x 64gb SD cards. Once I fill up all 5 XQD cards and they are all backed up to the SSDs I format them and pair them up with the next 5 SD cards (the SD cards are all numbered 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 2a etc to avoid any confusion). Using this method I always have at least 2 copies of each image, once the card is full I have 3 copies in 2 different locations.

I’ve heard stories of people losing images due to corrupted cards, so far it’s never happened to me and I’d like to keep it that way.