Photography
I've been capturing photos since the year 2000 when I bought my first digital camera, a Casio QV-3000EX. Yes, Casio, not Canon. :-D
... I should probably put some other stuff here eventually ...
Current camera: Canon EOS R3.
Favorite lens: Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 G2.
Sometimes I use a Rylo 360-degree camera. It works well in outdoor lighting conditions, when it doesn't overheat. But the editing software is the cool part. Update: and the company folded with an app that barely works, sigh. Update: sold it.
In June 2025 I finally decided to jump into the 360 photos and video stuff again, with a purchase of the new Insta360 X5 camera. I have been super impressed with its low-light performance. Unfortunately I lost it in Copenhagen during a trip, and lost a couple days of photos and videos. :-( But I liked it so much that I bought another one, and also bought some tracker tags and developed a lessons-learned about backing up photos during a trip. More below.
Let's Talk about Backups
Everyone knows you should backup your data. I keep 4 copies on 3 "services" in 4 regions. Here's how I do it:
- Every 2 months I download all of my data, including Google Photos, from Google using Google Takeout.
- On my own server with resilient ZFS RAID-Z2 storage, I unpack the Takeout archives and deduplicate the structure using hardlinks.
- Then my script automatically pushes copies to Google Cloud Storage and Amazon S3.
But what about backing up your photos while on a trip? You take lots of photos, using your phone or dedicated camera, and sometimes backups aren't possible due to no Wi-Fi or slow Wi-Fi upload speeds. Well, this happened to be in 2025. I was on a 2-week vacation in Europe with my new Insta360 X5 camera. I was taking a lot of 360 photos and several 360 videos, too. I was having a great time. Then I managed to leave it behind on a bus or metro train. Only 25% of what I had captured had managed to be backed up to my server at home by then. I lost several days of photos and videos. Luckily most of the photos, and some of the videos that I rendered into standard format, were uploaded to a temporary Google Photos album to share with family and friends during the trip. But I lost the originals and the ability to reflow the videos.
I even brought an SD card reader with me so I could copy the photos from the camera to my server at home using my phone. So how did this happen?
My phone is only a 128 GB model, so there is very little free space to hold backups directly on the phone. The AirBnBs I stayed at had slow Internet upload speeds. I was surprised how slow. So even though I tried to backup some of the data, I couldn't run the uploads overnight because my phone would be dead in the morning, and I needed the phone for travel each day. My metro passes were on the phone, for example. I did have an external battery pack with me, and in hindsight I should've just let the phone die overnight, and then charged it from the battery during the day while traveling, however inconvenient.
I decided to develop a strategy to prevent this from happening again.
- The FolderSync app on Android is amazing software. It allows copying between local targets as well as remote targets. Remote targets can be SFTP, GCS, S3, and almost every other service you can imagine. I was already using this app to backup the camera SD card to my server at home while traveling.
- The Anker A8346 USB-C hub has two SD slow (microSD and standard SD) that can be used simultaneously*, and it has a USB-C power input. This allows me to access two SD cards (using a microSD-to-standard-SD sled) simultaneously on my phone, while also charging the phone at the same time. This solves two problems:
- Keeping the phone charging overnight while backing up the photos.
- Providing the ability to copy from one SD card to a second SD card for a "local backup" that I can keep in my suitcase.
Now I can use FolderSync to copy everything from one SD card to a second SD card, and then upload to my server using the SFTP target, and let it run overnight while my phone continues to charge! Pretty sweet. I wish I had thought of this before the trip. :-D
I also realized I did not have any identification card or tracker tag in the camera bag, so that also needed fixing. The card with contact info was easy, but even better was buying some tracker tags. I decided to buy the Samsung StartTag2 and The Chipolo POP. The reason I bought both is because Samsung's do not participate in the Google Fund Hub network, but Samsung phones are the most common in the world. Luckily there is an app called uTag that allows you to run the Samsung SmartThings app on a non-Samsung Android phone, bypassing the Samsung-only restriction. And then the Chipolo POP seems to be a well-regarded tracker tag compatible with the Google Find Hub network. I placed one of each in the camera "pouch" that I always put the camera into when I'm not actively recording, and placed one of each in the larger camera carrying case that I usually leave behind for the day.
So far my experience has been limited to only a few days, but they're working well at least in the way that the apps alert me when leaving the tracker tags behind. The Samsung app allows you to setup a geofence based on a Wi-Fi SSID or address, so that you can prevent these alerts when leaving the tracker tags at home, for instance; but so far I haven't found a way to do this with the Google Find Hub app or Chipolo app.
I am placing the tags in my son's bag as he leaves for a trip soon. I am excited to see which tag works best on the trip.
Don't be like me. Have a local backup option available during your vacations! Hard lesson learned! I am just very lucky that I didn't lose everything since I was adding the photos and a few videos to a Google Photos album during the trip.
* Do you not see both SD cards on your phone when they are inserted into the USB-C hub? I had this problem. It turned out that my camera formats the cards without assigning a serial number/UUID. When Android mounts the first card, it mounts it at /mnt/media_rw/0000-0000, using 0000-0000 as a default when there is no serial/UUID. But when the second card is inserted, it fails to conflict resolve the mountpoint, and you can only access one card at a time. Be careful, though! Sometimes I would receive an Android notification saying the second drive needed "fixed" and the only solution was to format it. That does fix it, because the Android formatter will properly assign a serial/UUID, but of course you lose all data contained on the card. However, I also discovered that using the SD Association's card formatter (Windows & Mac, or Linux) results in dramatic speed increases while writing, and likely will increase the longevity of the SD cards. It also correctly assigns a random UUID to the cards. I highly recommend formatting with this utility now instead of using the built-in formatting function of your camera. They even published a paper showing the performance increases. I suspect this performance increase is accomplished by understanding something low-level about the card with regard to the reserved secure area (which I think is at the beginning of the card) and the size of the NAND pages (the actual flash memory cells). I noticed it used a 63 MiB offset for the first partition, whereas my camera used a 1 MiB offset and Android used a 64 MiB offset. If the partition is properly aligned with the NAND page sizes, this allows smaller writes to fit within a single page and not always write two pages.