AirStash+: Camera Backup On The Go

For the next three weeks I plan to be unplugged. I prepared four bog posts in advance, to keep to the established weekly schedule. Obviously the posts won't touch on the latest developments, but I do hope my faithful readers will find them interesting.

In the ongoing preparations for holidays trip, I tested the camera backup solution I proposed several weeks ago in the Adopting Foveon post. Unfortunately it did not work well. I furnished my Sigma cameras with Lexar 64GB SD cards. Then I bought a Transcend 128GB USB memory stick. And several USB-OTG (On-The-Go) hubs / card readers.

The first problem was formatting the cards. Every card larger than 32GB comes formatted with exFAT filesystem, which is not supported by stock Android. Fortunately Samsung adds exFAT drivers to their package, so the cards work when connected to my Galaxy Note (but do not when connected to the Nexus 10 Google tablet). Theoretically there is an option to reformat the card with FAT32, but I've read somewhere this may be risky, because reformatting may interfere with the wear-leveling controller in the card. No way to test this, so I decided to stay with the exFAT, at least for the cards in the cameras.

The second problem appeared when I found out my multi-USB/card OTG reader is actually not "multi". Meaning it cannot be used to simultaneously connect BOTH a USB stick and a SD card. I bough a different one, with a built-in hub. That seemed to work, and on the first day I was able to transfer all my photos from the SD card to the USB stick, using my Samsung phone. But on the second day the USB stick stopped working, there was a continuously popping up message the stick had to be formatted. When I got back home, after plugging the stick to my computer I realized it was completely empty, with all data lost. Not sure how it happened, but I suspect there might have been not enough power on the phone's OTG connector to drive both the stick and the SD card, and the USB hub.

Looking for a better solution (and still having the ultimate portability in mind), I found the ingenious device from Maxell called AirStash+. The AirStash+ looks like an oversized USB memory stick. But it does so much more:

1. It accepts an SD card as a storage. I have happily furnished it with a Kingston 128GB Class 10 SD card (had to reformat the card to FAT32, but I think I can live with that for a backup card).
2. When plugged to a computer it behaves as an ordinary USB memory stick. Mounts as a removable drive and you can drag&drop files to it (or from it).
3. The AirStash is a battery - powered wireless multimedia / WebDAV server. Yes there is a battery (7+ hours!), a complete server and a WiFi (802.11n) access point inside.
4. The battery charges via the USB port, it takes less than two hours to fully charge it, which is enough for the amazing (given the size of the device!) seven hours of operation.
5. When unplugged from a computer, the AirStash+ stick creates its own WiFi network and can be joined by several smartphones, tablets and computers. When accessed via WiFi, it offers wireless access to the storage SD card via the WebDAV protocol.

The AirStash+ is an impressive piece of hardware. Unfortunately the software lags far behind. There are AirStash apps for both iOS and Android, but they lack very basic functionality (like copying entire folders or groups of files - you have to transfer photos one by one, which hardly is an option).

Fortunately there are other applications compatible with WebDAV. I've tried the WebDAV Navigator from Sean Ashton and it works quite well. At least it allows me to select multiple files from the camera SD card connected via an OTG reader and upload them over to the AirStash+.

I will try this setup during summer: a phone, an SD OTG reader and AirStash+, the personal wireless WebDAV server in my pocket. It is hard to imagine anything smaller and lighter.

Looking forward, I see two areas to improve with this setup:

• For Maxell: do your job on the software. You won't win the market with the current paltry app.
• For Eye.Fi: consider support for WebDAV in your Pro X2 product line. It is probably a few lines of software in your embedded stack. But together with AirStash+ it would be the killer combo: a camera uploading photos in the background to a memory stick in my pocket.

Of course at some point in time camera manufacturers will figure out they should be putting a microUSB-OTG port as standard: this would allow to plug in any USB memory stick and backup the photos and easily transfer them to computers and the Cloud later on.