I carry external batteries like this to charge phones and other USB devices wherever I am. To protect my PC data, I back up my hard drives (having lost 7 hard drives in recent years). For my vehicle I carry a roadside assistance plan to get my vehicle towed when it breaks down. But what if your phone fails? The most common cause of failure is dropping it in water, which I’ve done. I’d rather upgrade to the latest model than carry an insurance plan on the phone itself, but when traveling I don’t stop to sync the data enough, or even just back up photos, so how can you avoid losing data?
On my September road trip, SanDisk offered me their new Wireless Memory Stick to use with my 2 phones: the old iPhone 5S I still had on a 2-year contract and an LG G4 that I use for photos. Fortunately I didn’t lose a phone on this trip, but when my SUV suffered a catastrophic failure, that underscored the fact that you just never know what’s going to go next!
The Wireless Stick worked like a charm on both my IOS and Android devices, both selective transfers of new photos from my 64GB iPhone and an automated Gallery Backup from the LG G4, which as you can see on the display in this photo, was 99% full, thanks in part to its high resolution images. In this photo I’m just topping off the Sandisk Wireless Stick (on top) using a battery I carry to charge USB devices. The Stick already had on it all of the new LG G4 images that I had taken, thanks to the Gallery Backup I had selected. It seemed too easy, almost too good to be true, but whenever I checked, it was up to date with the latest images. It’s a whole lot more convenient than driving to a Starbucks to clear memory cards from my DSLR onto my laptop PC, to ensure that it can complete before the batteries die! (My 17″ laptop uses a lot of power.)
It’s nice that the Wireless Stick also works like a traditional USB stick so you can transfer files directly to a PC. But when the vehicle that you’ve been using for power across much of your trip fails, it’s nice that your phone photo backup is current, one less thing to worry about with what little power may be left on your devices! I ran into exactly that situation when my SUV failed in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Grand Teton National Park and Salt Lake City: http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/?p=90322
When I returned from the trip and was able to replace my old iPhone 5S with an iPhone 6S+, I immediately tested that with the SanDisk Connect Wireless Stick as well. It comes in 16, 32, 64 & 128 GB sizes and SanDisk has provided a coupon for 30% off the 64GB size: https://goo.gl/1HRPrF
I’ll have to see what else it can do. I know that you can stream music and videos stored on it to up to 3 devices at once.
Product Learn More:
https://goo.gl/Gp0mBm
Product video:
https://goo.gl/SfTNNc
This was one of those "stop the car" moments. Snowy Telescope Peak had nice side…
The Geminids are the most active meteor shower of the year, and in recent years…
I was asked this question earlier today, and the more I thought of it, the…
So called "super bloom" years make it easy to find wildflowers in Death Valley, but…
We've reached a major milestone on our workshop program: we celebrated completing ten years of…
Spring 2022 is shaping up to be a very busy year in Death Valley, like…
This website uses cookies.
View Comments
como se entere Rajoy, te detiene la Guardia civil, no se puede robar energía solar.
Awesome!
I do to??sometimes i might forget a device but never my battery.
I stopped at ,,lost 7 hdd's in recent years,, , HOW ? i have been using pc's for 10 years, changed 4 of them and only lost 1EXTERNAL hdd cause my sister stepped on it but all internal drives from all my pc's are alive and well in my current build. Take more care of your stuff.
+Gabriel buzea I have been using PCs since I had a summer job at IBM in 1981 and was able to use one of the first ones, upgraded to 32K of RAM. At Sun Microsystems I sold refrigerator-sized RAID units to Netscape and others. I think they had 56 disks of 10GB each, for a total of 560GB total.
Today I live in a rural area, and the power grid is pretty flaky, so it can crash on a clear day. Lightning hits the grid and sends surges. With at least one version of Windows, if one disk drive became disconnected when you put the PC to sleep, if another one was connected in the meantime, the directory for the old drive was written over the directory of the new one, rending it unusable. I bought a 2-drive system to have the drives back each other up, but before I could duplicate my newest folders, the controller board failed, so I couldn't get to either drive.
Google measured an 8-9% failure rate at 2-3 years of age, but I probably don't buy drives with quite the quality they start with, and I certainly don't have as stable an operating environment as their data centers:
http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/
I've been creating massive amounts of data for the past 10 years, and I've found that it isn't safe to assume that the MTTF for a magnetic disk drive is much longer than 5 years. The charge stored there just dissipates, so drives just go bad over time.
As one report puts it,
"However hard disk drives do not last forever. They can wear out with continued use and even if the power is turned off the data in the hard disk drive will eventually decay due to thermal erasure (again we run into the enemy of data retention, thermodynamics). In practice hard disk drive arrays have built in redundancy and data scrubbing to help retain data for a long period. It is probably good advice to assume that HDDs in an active archive will last only 3-5 years and will need to be replaced over time."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2014/06/29/keeping-data-for-a-long-time/
Obviously average failure rates don't predict the lifespan of an individual unit. I have at least one large old 300GB unit (and maybe a 120GB 2" compact portable) still working, while others have failed within a couple of weeks of delivery.
The only real solution is to have backups for all of your data, and to re-write data from old drives onto new disk drives after no later than 5 years. That's not to say that older drives become more likely than not to fail, just that the cost of new storage has become so cheap that the now-trivial cost is more attractive than losing data such as photos, which often can't be replaced.
I have lost or had drives go corrupt, but I am good at recovering data. I recall having to sacrifice a partition to save most of my data once when OS and drive failed Jan 2003. My primary method of preventing data loss is having at least three partitions and not using My Documents (C drive) for most important documents and files.
If you have more than one computer, you can save the data if recovered near the time of drive failure. My most recent drive recovery required going online with my nearby laptop and getting boot sector recovery steps. I recovered all but my "TMP" drive.
I don't have anything but a simple Safelink phone, so my main issues are keeping it charged when it is most needed. (and not having it go inactive if I don't call someone at least once per month)
+Jeff Sullivan I just got Kingston MobileLite G2 (http://goo.gl/MnT83P) device that servers multiple purposes:
- allows direct transfer between usb cards/flash drives that can be simultaneously plugged in
- serves as battery backup/recharge station for mobile phones
- serves as a hotspot and/or wireless bridge, including with wired networks.
It works pretty well and quite fast. My goal was not to have to carry a laptop on a trip; a phone (iOS or Android) or an tablet is enough and provides the interface to the device via an app.
As a backup strategy I have been carrying two 256Gb and one 128Gb usb flash drives, to which I offload the photos from the camera and/or phone every day. I feel this works well and leaves me also independent of an external hd, always prone to failures, as we know.
As soon as I get back home, everything is backed up onto two different external backup hds and to the cloud (I use Backblaze, which works very well and is quite inexpensive - $50/year unlimited backup for one machine).
Has been working like a charm so far!
+Julie Frey What data recovery software do you use? I have a few of dead drives that I'd like to try to recover as time (and their condition) permits.
Sweet I could use one of those
If you worry so much about your data all you have to do is get an hdd which you use only for backing up your days work and then storing it away so if your hdd fails then all you do is buy another then restore data from that backup, it's that simple or use a cloud service. For the phone same thing and if you're on the road use the cloud storage. Seriously, if you use cloud services or just build yourself an ssd server you will never have to worry about losing your data even if your phone is stolen.