Hey, this is Scott of Photography Banzai. In this video I'm going to go over an on-site
backup solution and editing solution I put together. There are a lot of similar
options like this. Of course, the GNAR Box is a big one. I've seen a lot of videos
about it lately. Good option. It is very compact there's a lot of features. Also,
I'll link one in the description similar to my solution that you can check out. In
my case I'm using a phone that I had on hand. An LG X Power phone. It has Android
version 6. It is a prepaid phone, which you can actually just go to a store and buy
a prepaid phone. A negative there is that you will most likely not be able to
update your Android operating system unless you hack it. Because you would
need a SIM card with service to potentially get updates if they are
available. Now, that's Android itself. It's not all
of the updates that come through Google Play, which you will get those. Just
something to keep in mind if you're going with a phone. You could also use a
tablet or something similar. Nice thing about this phone is I had it, of course...
It has a large battery. 4100 milliamp hours. Micro SD card. Does have the headphone
jack. I could potentially use that for something in the future as well. But the
main feature is the USB OTG support, which makes a lot of this function.
That's USB On-The-Go. Basically makes the phone a hosts USB
device. So you can connect whatever you want to the phone it'll probably work
alright. The main thing that spurred making this was this little Insignia SD...
micro SD card reader for phones. I saw it at the store for $10 on sale. Picked it
up, and I found out the original phone I had planned on using didn't have the USB
OTG support. But I was able to use this one so it worked out alright.
Now you just simply connect that device to the phone. In this case LG has a
built-in file manager. But you can easily buy one or get a free one on the Android
App Store if your phone doesn't have one. So just connect it to the phone. Hook up
your card to the device then you can just copy over the files to internal
storage or the micro SD card inside the phone. Pretty simple as long as your
phone is able to have a micro SD card you can have pretty large storage. There
actually 400 gigabyte micro SD cards I think even larger now. They are
pretty pricey, but around 128 gigabytes is a pretty reasonable option at the
moment. Of course, you can actually connect most cameras themselves directly
to the phone and just copy over the images in that case, but I do like this
external card reader. One thing to consider this is USB 2. That means a
maximum theoretical transfer rate of 60 megabytes per second. Now, that's fast
enough for me, but just keep that in mind when you are thinking about this
solution. Besides the card reader, I picked up a
few other cables. There's a straight pass through cable to have a standard USB
connection on one end, and then the connection to the phone another end. In
that case I can hook up a USB Drive to the phone for external storage. So here
I'm testing out a 64 gigabyte USB Drive directly connected to the phone. I can
copy over images or videos to that drive either way. It really doesn't matter.
Works very nicely in that case. Now, of course, you can actually connect a hard
drive to the phone for a lot of extra storage. A few things to keep in mind. One
is the formatting of the drive. You will most likely have to change it to
something like a exFAT, or a linux variant of a file system. Now in Windows
I was able to convert my drive pretty easily. I just didn't have anything on it.
So I reformatted it to exFAT and that gave me the ability for Android to read
that hard drive. Another thing to keep in mind with the hard drives is power. In
this case the smaller external hard drives pull power from the USB. Now this
LG X Power phone is capable of pushing enough power to the drive to power it.
But I decided to buy a cable that splits the power and the data connections. That
way the drive itself will be powered by something else. Either a large battery or
directly to AC power with a USB charger. Just make sure the amps are high enough
to power the hard drive continuously. Connecting the hard drive with that
split cable is a little quirky. I have to actually connect
the drive to the phone first and it's being powered by the phone. But then I
can connect either a battery pack or the AC power with that second lead on that
cable. Now at that point the power is going from either the battery or the AC
power to the hard drive. I can actually disconnect the phone at that point and
you can see the hard drive is still running. So it works alright. I was able
to copy images to the hard drive and back. Just keep in mind with a hard drive
it might be a little difficult to get things running. But once you do it should
work just fine. So with this phone I decided to pick up
a nice solid case for it. This case was surprisingly inexpensive. Very solid... Nice
and thick plastic especially on the back and the sides. I also have a screen
protector in this case a matte finish to make it easier to see in different
lighting conditions. And the ports have covers which is a nice little extra
benefit. I decided to put some Velcro on the back of the case and the SD card
reader. So those can be permanently connected together so I won't lose the
card reader very easily. Nice thing about using a straight Android device is the
app situation. You can have apps to edit the images directly through the phone.
You can output to different devices with the screens... Something like a Chromecast.
You can actually connect printers to it. Do little tests here with my black and
white printer, see if it works. So many different options with the Android
device. Then you have a few little extra benefits like the flashlight integrated
into the phone. And then you can connect your cameras to that device instead of
your personal phone. So if you want to do wireless control it's all built in to
your backup and editing device for on-site use. I did try this device out
and my local state park. Worked very nicely. Just pulled it out at the ends of
the day. Copied over all of the images and videos to the device very easily.
My new backup device...
Make sure... it's on. It's good!
So...
Come on...
Simple as... one.
Pop out the Fujifilm memory card.
We got connected.
Let's just copy this entire folder to the SD card. Let's put it in here...
So I have 75 images.
I accidentally did some JPEGs, but you get the idea. So
So I'm not gonna wait until this is done.
But I can leave this running for however long it's
gonna take. Easy enough.
Of course it's not super quick, but it's
fast enough. By the time that I had put all of my stuff back in my bag, it was
almost finished. Using a device like this is really up to your imagination. There's
so many options. So many things that you could potentially do with something like
this. Using Android means you have a huge app store of different photography
related apps to use. And then you've got the simple case of backing up things to
the device. And pushing images to other backup devices. So it is very versatile
it's really not extremely portable. But if you just bring the phone you don't
need the other stuff to bring along with you and easily put it in a pocket. So I
think it's gonna work pretty well for me in this case. Big negative here is this specific
phone is locked to a prepaid carrier. So I won't be able to get Android updates
in the future if they do come out. Because I don't use that carrier anymore. But
besides that it's really nice little device. I think it's gonna work out well.
I hope you found this interesting. I'm Scott from Photography Banzai. Thanks! If you
haven't subscribed please consider subscribing.
That does really help me out these days. Especially with how YouTube has changed
their partner program. That said, I appreciate you watching my content.
Liking and sharing it. Thanks again!