I’ve been trying to lighten my travel photo setup in recent years. I’ve landed on a nice lightweight camera and lenses solution, but I had been searching for a way to downsize my setup for backing up files as well when I’m on the road.
It’s not uncommon for me to snap hundreds of photos a day on a trip. I want to back those up to a portable SSD drive at the end of each day, rather than having them live only on memory cards. For years, this has meant lugging a laptop around. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on this, since I don’t have a significant need for a pricey laptop aside from a couple trips a year.
I recently landed on a much lighter — and reasonably priced — solution. It involves three items and one app:
- A USB-C hub that has:
- A dedicated power port for plugging in a power cable (i.e., a port labeled PD)
- An SD card slot (assuming your camera uses SD cards)
- A tablet with a USB-C port
- A portable external drive
- The Solid Explorer File Manager Android app
For reference, here are the gear I used (this is not a paid endorsement; just sharing a setup that worked well for me):
Anker USB C Hub, 7in1 Multi-Port USB Adapter with an 85W Max PD port and a memory card slot
Lenovo Idea Tab 11 with 8 GB of RAM (I think the 8GBs of RAM helped with the transfer speed)
SANDISK 2TB Extreme Portable SSD (this is the old model, which I got before AI made data storage costs sky-high like it’s 1999)
Which plugs into which?
Here’s the hardware setup:
- Plug the USB-C hub’s connector cable into the tablet’s USB-C port
- Plug the tablet’s power cable into the PD port on the USB-C hub
- Plug the memory card from your camera into the memory card slot on the USB-C hub
- Plug the external drive into a USB port on the USB-C hub
Here’s a reference image:
Open a file manager app
Some of the instructions I found said you can use Android’s built-in file manager app (Files), but I could only get it to show the SSD drive, not the camera memory card.
Instead, I was able to make it work with the Solid Explorer File Manager Android app. The first time you open the app with the memory card and external drive connected, it’ll ask for permissions to access those devices. Once you grant it permissions, you should be able to view the contents of the memory card and the external drive in two side-by-side panels.
In this view, you can select images in the memory card panel and select the pink arrow icon to transfer to the external drive (the other panel).
In my recent field test, I copied images from a 256GB (140MB/s) Lexar memory card to a Sandisk 2TB SSD drive (1050MB/s). I did so in batches of about 100 to 150 RAW files at a time. Each batch took a minute or less.
This setup also worked with my Android phone, but I preferred the tablet because of the larger screen. I also connected a Bluetooth mouse to the tablet that made it easier to select large numbers of files quickly.
Weighting in
So how much weight did this setup add to my travel gear?
- USB-C hub: 2.35 oz
- SSD drive: 1.76 oz
- Tablet: 17.6 oz
That added up to 1.3 pounds, or just over half the weight of the lightest laptops (not counting the weight of the laptop power plugs, which can be hefty). Size-wise, everything fit comfortably in my backpack-size camera bag.