Wolverine FlasPac 7000 experience and lessons learned

[Bactman]

My parents recently had the opportunity to travel through Eastern Europe for six weeks or so, and were on the verge of buying 8 two-gig SD cards to take with them. I (sensing an opportunity to acquire a nifty device) convinced them that having multiple cards lends itself to problems such as losing cards, copying over cards, bad cards, etc. I asked my dad to look into portable media storage devices in lieu of taking many cards.

He settled on the aforementioned Wolverine FlasPac 7000, an 80bg device. The Wolverine is about the size/shape of a slim late-generation cassette player and has two buttons: on/off and copy. Can't be that hard to figure out. Plus it has a svelte belt loop thingy and carrier that looks like you are toting a large PDA.

He charged the unit and they went off to Eastern Europe, not taking nearly as many pictures as I tend to do when on holiday. Every so often they copied pictures onto the Wolverine, but didn't delete them from the SD cards. Go figure. So by the end of the trip, they were still copying photos from two weeks ago onto the Wolverine.

Some notes:

-Functionally, one cannot look at the photos on the Wolverine, you only trust that every file has been copied and saved in some secure folder.

-They did not have a problem with transferring from the SD card to the Wolverine, and from the Wolverine to the computer.

-Aside from the multiple copies of the same picture, everything worked smoothly.

-The Wolverine's battery would need to be recharged every three or four transfers, but that wasn't much of an issue for them.

For my recent trip to Istanbul, I asked to borrow the Wolverine. Ultimately, I tend to take more pictures while traveling than them, and the file sizes are much larger compared to their PnS.

The first thing I did was work on figuring out how to operate the Wolverine. Lets see ... turn on .... insert card ..... copy. Wait a few minutes (depending on file size to copy). Ahhh ... there it is, done. Remove card, turn off Wolverine. Very simple. The Wolverine connects via USB to a PC for transfer of files. Again, very easy.

First day in Istanbul - I need to remove my parents vacation photos et al. So I format the Wolverine via my laptop. Big Mistake!!!!!! Yes, the Wolverine formatted. But the selected file system was NTFS - something the Wolverine apparently does not support. I tried and tried to transfer photos from my SDHC to the Wolverine and all I received was an error message from the Wolverine "HDD not Fat32, Please format!". So I did. Again. And again. Still no luck. In fact, it corrupted my friend's memory card and he lost a day's worth of photos.

So ... I had a non-functional Wolverine in Istanbul with eight days of upcoming treks throughout the city. Sweet! Thank God I brought my laptop and external hard drive as a back up plan!

I managed, and we made it back to the States. Essentially, I needed to reformat the Wolverine and select Fat32 for the file system. I cannot select Fat32 on any of my computers and do not have access to the instruction cd. There is a freeware file called Swissknife that can format the Wolverine and select Fat32, so big thanks to random post on a Canon camera forum! The Wolverine is now functional, and I look forward to giving it a good workout this weekend at a local arts festival.

Also, having talked to my dad, he asked for it back. I honestly didn't see that coming - I had hoped he had forgotten about it by now.