Building a Portable SD Backup Solution

This is a project that is specially suited for photographers (both hobby and amateur ones). Even more if you are a travel enthusiast. This project intends to negate the disaster-scenario of losing all your photos --if your memory card corrupts, you lose it, or whatever else happens to your gear.

Thinking about this, I thought about having some on-the-go equipment that allows to backup photos, hassle-free, no laptop involved –yes I sometimes travel without my laptop!– and I discovered that there already exists a project that meets my expectations:

If you have tinkered with Raspberry Pi, it will be a very straightforward project to have up&running. I highly recommend it! Now let's dive into fancier stuff...

Going the extra mile

I hate USB card readers. I have had some bad luck with cheap and faulty hardware. And it is very easy to lose them. So... why not future-proof my project into something a little more self-contained?

Basically we took some reasonable-quality card reader and combined that with a Raspberry Pi 3 (we want to have WiFi in that! otherwise a RPi 2 would be good enough). It is reasonably small for our purposes. Note that the photo doesn't show the external SSD drive, which is quite small and portable by itself.

Geek details

To make everything smaller and more self-contained, we choose the kind of card reader that go inside the PC and connect to the motherboard. The thing that allows this to work is that motherboard USB 2.0 connections are "two USBs", and the component that we desoldered from the Raspberry Pi is "two USBs". Of course, we have to check the pinout, as they are pair of USB designed for different purposes, but they are pin-compatible –a USB is a USB: V+, GND, Data+, Data-.

The soldering is not a work of art, but it works. Add a dab of hot glue to make sure that there is no mechanical stress –things can easily break and that's no fun.

If you want to follow my steps but use instead a Raspberry Pi 4, avoid the USB 3.0 connectors, as it will be a soldering nightmare (unless you are very confident in your skills...). I would recommend to buy an internal USB 2.0 card reader and leave the USB 3.0 untouched, and use it for the external SSD. Or, if you believe that you really need to read cards with 3.0 speed (is it really worth it?), then use an external reader –you can combine them into a single box and use a very short standard USB 3.0 cable for interconnecting them.

Connectivity

The little-backup-box can work offline and there's no problem in that operation mode. However, you may want to make off-site backups, or allow your friends to look at the photos –e.g. during a hiking trip before going to sleep.

My take on this is to configure a wireless network that will be a hotspot from my Android phone. I have taken note of the SSID and password and, whenever I turn on the LiBaBox, if the hotspot is available the Raspberry will connect to it. With this, I am able to connect to the WebUI and manage and view photos, even if I have no real connectivity –I only need my Android phone and the hotspot feature.