Kostas wites: : well seems I am REALLY out of luck.... : 1- I do not wish to have a hard drive : 2- I do not wish to spend that much money : 3- It is computer depended : : seems the closer I can get is this: : http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/366520-REG/Aleratec_330100_USB_Copy_C ruiser_Plus.html : : and carry an extra flash drive/card reader with cards firstly what sort of cards are you using Kostas? .. It may be cheaper and better to buy more cards than a backup device - maybe? other options: something like the Chinese made OTG (On The Go) devices I wrote of about a year back that are cheap, and so far have been 100% reliable at least for me. There's one here on ebay that doubles as a multimedia player - I have 2 of these styles of media players :) http://tinyurl.com/yp4nks a slightl different style: http://tinyurl.com/2y8kas another few styles I haven't tried that take hard drives are here: http://tinyurl.com/yrdvys http://tinyurl.com/2m49nl for these you need to add your own hard drive (they come without) but hard drives are cheap. If you want to save power and run a more ruggedized version you could always add a IDE/CF adapter like this http://tinyurl.com/ysda89 and use a CF card instead of a hard drive. They're good for adding a solid state boot drive to a PC too ( Not so good for XP/Vista/NT or any other OS that demands a swap file on the boot drive though!) 16Gb CF cards sell on ebay for a reasonable price: http://tinyurl.com/2gukbm - though the power saving may be there, the down side is the storage capacity is very small :/ a hard drive for a little more $$ would give you ten times the capacity. Mind you, smaller 2.5" hdd's on ebay sell very cheaply (40Gb sell around $40) The Vosonic XS-Drive range was the first style I wrote about on Photoforum, they've been around for a long time now and they've proved to be rock solid performers - a little less flashy than the other brands that have come along since, and most models don't have image viewing functions, but since the viewing screens are so small on the other devices thay are largely useless. one vosonic drive: http://tinyurl.com/2bqxka The ones I bought for the college years ago are still working fine :) When I went to work for a photographic distributor after leaving college I found we were selling four times as many Nikon versions, even though they were almost twice the price of the Vosonic models and had less functionality - they also were a lot less reliable as we only had one Vosonic returned by a mac user who couldn't seem to connect it to his computer and we had many, many more Nikons returned that were dead. Names don't mean much these days apart from maybe a prettier case.. the electronic design is all done by someone else and of course the electronics are all made offshore at the cheapest factory. I looked for something that might do a data transfer from a card to a USB device like the cheaply available phone SIM backup devices do, but no luck (they should be easily designed!) and while I've heard of reader/backup devices that write CD's, I've never seen or tested one.. I have little trust for optical drives when magnetic ones are so cheap (!) My best suggestion isto buy more cards - maybe working out per $ which capacity is cheapest (2Gb seem to be the best) , assuming you use SD cards, the higher capacity micro and mini SD cards that sell on ebay tend to be a lot cheaper than the larger SD cards used in cameras .. hope this helps Karl
