Since I’m going to Spain soon, I wanted a light and effective way to back up my SD cards every day during the trip. There were some old and no longer available devices on the market, but all had limited capacity and rather expensive... or bulky.
I came across a neat project that uses a Raspberry Pi zero 2 (this is a much faster version of the old Pi zero) and also supports Wi-Fi. I made one, designed a custom case for it that I 3D printed (I have files for anyone that wants to to this project), and can say it works extremely well.
The device is extremely simple, plug in a target storage device (in the pictures I have an extremely tiny crucial 4 terabyte ssd drive - the square thing), plug in a card reader (in the picture it’s that very compact usb stick so no cables needed), and it will automatically back up what’s on the SD card. It won’t overwrite files, only add new ones, and recognizes different SD cards so it makes separate folders for each unique SD card. It has a screen that shows transfer status, and while idle shows you the ip address so you can log into it with a phone and web browser. The thing is, with a portable battery, you can do this without even being near an outlet, and entirely in the field or on the go.
pics Lens cap for scale
here’s some screen shots if you want to log in You can also get thumbnails of images, but that takes way too long to generate, so I leave that function off
the project can be found here - https://github.com/outdoorbits/little-backup-box
the hardware portion isn’t entirely concise, if if people make this for themselves I can share what I got and from where. The main parts list are:
raspberry Pi zero 2
four port usb hat -
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3298?gclid=Cj0KCQjwlPWgBhDHARIsAH2xdNdICMYNwWVgb1i4BRLETI_8Mrep_RZf8hiQgtu4lT8W80hEM3GsQvEaAlU1EALw_wcB
and the OLED display (make sure if you get it from adafruit to get the pigtail connector) -
https://www.adafruit.com/product/938
the best thing is, you can use any low power ssd storage drive, and if you need more space, just get more drives.
for the usb card reader, I got this, that’s in the image -
SD Card Reader, uni USB SD Card...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087QG75L7?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
for the large storage I am using this -
Crucial X6 4TB Portable SSD – Up...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W1KDM9K?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
I hope this helps someone looking for an on the road backup solution, and is a tinkerer like me.