iDevice As A Photo Backup On The Go

On professional photography forums you may find discussions about dedicated photo backup devices. One that has been making some splash recently is the Gnarbox. Also hadr drive manufacturers like WD used to offer portable drives that could copy photo files from an SD card, without any assistance of a computer. Backing up photos makes sense - things break and get stolen and many memories captured are really priceless. Unfortunately most of these backup solutions are clunky and slow and you never can tell the backup has been completed properly. A drive will flash some leds, but you do not have a simple way to check how the backed photos look like.

I have been recently experimenting with an iPad Mini as a photo backup device. Actually any iDevice would do. The reason I chose the Mini is that my primary phone is Android (and I'm not changing that for a while, but of course iPhone users may simply use an iPhone as a backup device). The latest iPhones have 256GB of flash storage. The iPad Mini is "only" 128GB, but that still means it can back up 2000 RAW high resolution photos. Which is plenty (I try to limit the number of photos I bring back from vacation trips down to 100-200, so 2000 gives me a lot of room to spare.

There are two really beautiful aspects of using an iDevice as a backup:

1. It is very simple and fast. You need the Apple camera adapter (they come in several variants: for SD cards or just as USB-A ports to connect to a camera via a cable). The moment you plug it in iOS launches the import dialog that shows previews and allows you to select what to import (also skipping duplicates). I shoot RAW only and it handles the RAW files without any effort. The assurance of backing up RAW files is that iOS will not try resizing them. Later when at home, the files can be imported from the iPad to a computer using a standard photo import function - the imported photos behave like they were captured by the iPad camera. Unfortunately there is no equivalent of this feature on Android. You can import using an USB-C port, but you have to use a file explorer app and generally it is much slower.
2. You can view the imported photos on the big screen. Which is awesome. And you can delete the ones you don't want, making more room and having the preselection done before importing for post processing.

Again for photographers who own iPhones, this is a no brainer: get an adapter and you can start backing up photos. For those using non-Apple phones, actually the iPad Mini seems to be a very good option. It weighs just 300 grams (similar to a Kindle), has a decent battery (if using just for photos, will easily last more than a week). And it can serve other purposes too. It can be a Kindle by installing the Kindle app. Kindle screens are not that great for guide books containing maps and photos. Kindle app on a small tablet serves much better. And last but not least, the iPad is great device for a high resolution, offline map with GPS (only cellular variants!) positioning. GaiaGPS on an iPad is just awesome. For more than a year now I have been using the full version and it is just fantastic, regardless if the destination is Himalayas, Utah or Atlas in Morocco.

It will be hard, if not impossible, to design a photo backup device that outperforms an iPhone or iPad. That is why I've been quite skeptical WRT Gnarbox. Time will tell how useful the software they promise is, but for now it seems it will be hard for them to offer anything that beats the versatility, weight, speed and size/weight of an iDevice.