I was thinking of buying the WD passport wireless to travel with. I am attracted to the device as I can copy from an SD card without having to take a computer and can also use it with my iPad.
The problem is when I have copied everything onto the WD passport drive, how do I back the WD passport drive up to another hard drive without using a computer? I really don’t feel comfortable just relying on one hard drive to store all my things (due to malfunction or loss). Is it possible to clone and sync the WD passport to another drive for backup without the use of a computer?
The Passport wireless does not have any drive to drive backup software. If you connect the Passport to you home WIFi network it can be accessed over the network by other devices. But it cannot control any kind of backup to other devices.
Basically, my MPW is used for travel use. EVERY bit of data on it is COPIED from an original source elsewhere in my home system, so in a sense the MPW data is a backup copy of the original files I have stored elsewhere… If I were to put any new media or other files on it via the SD card, I would immediately connect the MPW to a computer when I am back home and copy that new media on MPW to a drive on my PC for permanent safe keeping.
It does not seem like a good solution then. I will be backpacking for 6 months with no access to my home computers. I wanted something that I could copy photos onto from an SD card, but it is useless if it does not do drive to drive backup. There is no way that I would trust having everything on one drive without a backup. Plus taking 6 months of SD cards would work out very expensive. With this in mind I am struggling to see the point in this device, unless it is for very short trips.
There are no cheap backup solutions.
Even the second drive for a ‘drive to drive backup’ costs something and adds weight.
And for the price of two 256GB SDcards you get an additional WD wireless, that would give you the redundancy you desperately need …
The WD mobile app for accessing the MPW can be used to auto-upload photos and videos taken with your smartphone. Pictures taken with a modern digital camera may be higher resolution (and massive files) . If all you want to do is keep mobile phone photos safely stored, the auto upload feature may work well if you have access to wi-fi once in a while or your cell data plan,
There is no “free lunch” here when you are gone for six months. There are trade offs to be made. maybe a cloud storage solution would work; there are lots of them around. I think you have some homework to do to find a good strategy.
I don’t take pictures on a phone but on a digital SLR and I agree the files are “huge”. Also the cloud is not a good solution, as I will be wild camping in some of the most remote places in the world. For much of the 6 months I don’t expect to have any internet access. I won’t even take a normal phone and plan on taking a satellite phone just for emergency.
It seems the best solution is bring a small laptop and a good sized hard drive and a good sized handful of SD cards you can fill so next time back to a world with electricity you can do a big data dump from the SD cards to the HD, clear the SD cards and start over again. You could use a MPW Pro, but it still would be best to dump the data with it connected to a laptop and use data dump from SD card very infrequently direct to MPW. Good luck with all this.
Sounds like a big adventure with certain risks.
Losing data on the MPWP seems to be the least of them
If weight for PowerBanks and Harddisks is not an issue, then take an MPWP and a competitive product with you. One of the two might survive the trip, most probably both.
And when coming back, let us know, how reliable each backup solution was.
By the way, do you consider a Raspberry Pi 3, setup as automatic backup server without screen, keyboard and mouse a computer? If setup properly, the only thing you need is to sit in a car, start PI on car power, connect the MPWP and an external USB disc to it and wait until the external USBs LED stops blinking …
Another idea:
motivate a linux guru to write a script, that copies new content from the SD Import directory of your MPWP to an attached USB harddisk as soon as you press the Battery/SDcard/WPS button.
Would be easy for WD engineers to add such a functionality:
With an SD card inserted in the slot, press once to start transfer from SD card With an USB device connected to the USB 2.0 port, press once to start transfer from USB device With an USB device connected to the USB 2.0 port, double press to start backup to USB device Connects to a router using WPS. Press and hold approximately 5 seconds to start WPS. When the drive is off, press to show battery status briefly. Press momentarily for other devices to connect to the My Passport Wireless Pro directly when it is connected to another wireless network…
The exact behaviour and directories could be configured in an advanced backup menu or in a file on the root directory
[quote=“Timothy_G, post:2, topic:194136, full:true”]
The Passport wireless does not have any drive to drive backup software… But it cannot control any kind of backup to other devices.[/quote]
Timothy, the Passport Wireless has a USB connection from which it can import. So in principal, there is no reason that it cannot also backup to that USB drive. And the drive does have backup functionality but it seems to only support targets in the “Cloud”.
I share adam_man’s requirement. One backup is simply not enough and as convenient as the Passport Wireless Pro is for the initial backup, it needs to support a secondary backup.
You are missing the OP’s point. He isn’t using the Passport drive to bring stuff from home. He is using it to bring stuff back home - specifically irreplaceable photographs.
With an SD card inserted in the slot, press once to start transfer from SD card