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I went on a long trip with a mirrorless camera and a SanDisk 500GB portable disk. My "computer-less" backup solution was a Pi-esque machine with USB3 (a RockPi), a powerbank, a card reader, and connecting my phone over USB and tethering it. This gave the RockPi an IP I could ssh into, and I'd ssh from the phone and ran rsync to copy the images from the SD card in the reader to the SanDisk portable drive.

I should make a custom Linux image for the Pi4+ (the whole process is probably too slow without USB3) and some automation (Jenkins?) to do this, I'm sure there's photographers who'd find it useful.



That's very neat!

Personally, these days I have less of a need for that kind of thing, given that I can just plug the camera or disk into my phone directly (I suspect a powered USB hub and plugging in both at the same time might even work as well?), but I vaguely recall dedicated "copy everything off this card onto a hard drive" devices being sold, and I don't doubt that some photographers still use these in their workflow.


What happens when you connect the mirrorless directly to the phone with usbc?

My Sony can do MSC mode when connected to the PC. I haven't tested but I assume it would do the same when connected to a phone.




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