Travel workflow

[rpcrowe]

My question is:

IS IT POSSIBLE TO COPY MY IMAGES TO TWO EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES FROM A NOTEBOOK COMPUTER AT THE SAME TIME?

I will generally use a 17-inch Toshiba notebook to down load my images each evening when I am traveling in my motor home (because the extra weight of the 17-inch is no problem). When flying, I share my wife's 14-inch HP notebook to save weight.

I don't usually do any editing while traveling but, I do make a cursory inspection of the images to detect any mechanical errors. if I spot a mechanical problem early, I can either correct that problem or cease shooting with that lens or camera. I will always have at least two cameras while traveling. I can spot any problem more easily on a larger notebook screen than I could on a camera LCD.

After downloading the CF cards to the notebook, I will copy them to a pair of small physical size, 500GB capacity, external hard drives. We each carry one of these drives in our hand carried luggage. That way, if something bad would happen to one carry-on bag, I would not lose my images.

Copying to the two external hard drives concurrently would save time. Even if it takes longer to copy, I could start the copy as I go to sleep and have it done during the night. I am usually quite tired at the end of a day of travel...

[FrankMi]

Hi Richard, I'm assuming that you want to run both copies simultaneously so that you don't need to be at the computer to start the second copy? If your notebook supports the connections to two external hard drives at the same time, it shouldn't be a problem to run multiple copies from a PC, I do it all the time. I don't know about a Mac.

[rpcrowe]

I have heard that TERACOPY speeds up the transfer...
http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

[FrankMi]

This is the first time I've seen this application, but like any software you can add to your system, you'll want to test it thoroughly before taking it on the road. That includes testing it's removal in case it doesn't play nicely with other applications that are vying for the same operating system and hardware resources.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Richard,

The Nikon Software copies from a card to both a primary and secondary location at once, I'd be surprised if the Canon software didn't also allow that.

Failing that, I'm sure that LR3 does too, as will Phtoshop CS no doubt.

Not sure if you have any of those on your laptops though.

[herbert]

Hi Richard,

What operating system do you have? This will affect any recommendations.

Regards,

Alex

[herbert]

Hi Richard,

Having had some sleep I reread your thread and see you are on a laptop so I am assuming windows.

I use PureSync to synchronise folders:

http://www.jumpingbytes.com/en/puresync.html

There are lots of nice options and it is free to use. However you can only open one instance at a time so it will not be able to copy to two locations at the same time.

If you are just doing a file copy you could use Microsoft's tool:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithcomb...t-it-here.aspx

I used this before as it works very well. You can run two instances and so will be able to perform two copies at the same time. If you look in the options dialog you will be able to configure it to not copy files if they exist in the destination directory, if they are different sizes or have been modified.

However running RichCopy (or any other application) twice is not performing a true dual copy, i.e. read a file once and write it to multiple files in different locations. I could not find a tool to do that in my 5 minute search. However there are some problems with this process anyway. Reading a file and writing a file to different locations all take different amounts of time. The multiple write will therefore be bottlenecked by the slowest process. At least running two side-by-side copies each can run at the optimum write speed for the destination. However the read speed for the source will be limited since the disk has to work hard to read files for two different copy processes.

For your purposes I think RichCopy will allow you to set up two copies on your laptop and then go to bed. They should be done by the morning. Given the common speed of external drives I think that the internal drive should be able to keep up with reading files twice for each write to the different drives.

Cheers,

Alex