On a trip with a lot of photos, I never like to have the SD card be the only place my photos are stored. I've had too many of them break or go bad. I shoot Raw+, so the cloud takes a lot of bandwidth. In the old days (just a few years ago) I carried along an Ebook to back up to its hard drive. These days, I seem to like to travel with the iPad Air, and an underpowered notebook is a bit cumbersome.
My current solution is one of the 5 in 1 WAP/battery/SD card readers. I have tried two of them (EasyAccess and RavPower), and I thought I would share my experiences with them. Both models have a battery backup, a wireless access point (WAP), an SD card reader and a USB port which will accept a USB HD. Both will charge another device through a USB connection and both are charged by micro USB port. Both are about the size of a USB hard drive, but a little narrower. Both are sold on Amazon.
The first I tried was the EasyAcc 5 in 1. The pros to this device are that it has a whopping 8800mah backup battery. It can charge a smartphone 5 times. It also has a wired ethernet connection and can act like a wireless router. However, it has one firmware shortcoming that makes it a problem for shooters of Raw files, especially for the 24mp K3. Its transfers from the SD to the USB HD are over wifi, and must go through the tablet. It takes hours to transfer a day's raw shooting. What is worse is that something always seems to happen to the connection during the hours you leave the iPad (or smartphone) and WAP connected for the transfer, and you end up starting where the transfer stopped. You can't just leave it going all night. I reviewed the device on Amazon and wrote the manufacturer about the firmware, and they just tried to convince me to change my review rather than improving their product.
The next device I tried was the RavPower 5 in 1. It is half as thick as the EasyAcc, but the EasyAcc has almost 3 times the battery power. At first, its wireless seemed a bit buggy, but there had been a number of firmware upgrades to the Ravpower which seem to have fixed the issues. It also has a free iPad app, while EasyAcc asks to you buy FileBrowser (an excellent app, BTW). However, the biggest winning point for the Ravpower is that its SD card transfer is internal. You access its browser interface and tell it to copy from the SD to HD, but all the transfer takes place through the internal, wired connections. A dump of a day's shooting which would take hours on the EasyAcc takes 10-15 minutes on the Ravpower, and your iPad is not monopolized. This device is the clear winner for photographers.
I still use both products. The extra battery alone on the EasyAcc is worth the $40. Either device will do a good job getting your jpegs to your tablet for posting on social media or display. However, for backing up SD cards full of raw files, the Ravpower is the only good choice.
Last edited by GeneV; 08-26-2014 at 07:18 AM.