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Saving to both CF and SD cards simultaneously!

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Sounds great to have backup from the outset although only rarely have I had a corrupted card that couldn't be recovered. However, with the advent of 4 and 8GB cards, this capability seems a great idea for important work. Now, so many more images are at risk.

So who uses this capability of the 1D series?

Which card pairs work best?

What are the speed losses if any?

Asher
 

Alan T. Price

New member
I don't use this capability at present, prefering instead to keep the SD card as a spare for when the other one fills up.

Any card pair should work, but there are two ways of implementing the backups:

method 1. Everything on one card is copied in-camera by the camera to the other card.

pros:
100% backup on separate media

master and backup files have the same format, so choice of format is wide open (RAW, RAW+JPG, JPG)

cons:
No in-camera spare media

In effect both cards will have the same capacity, so you are limited to a maximum of 2GB because that is presently the maximum supported SD card capacity.

The rest of your CF is wasted unless you decide to change operating mode once the smaller card is filled.

You may have to replace both cards simultaneously.



method 2. RAWs are saved by the camera to one card and JPGs are saved by the camera to the other.

pros:
100% backup of images

better use can be made of large CF cards by putting the smaller JPGs on the SD card and the larger RAWs on the CF.

cons:
no in-camera spare media

the master and backup files must have different formats (RAW and JPG)

only the mark II cameras support this mode at present.

You may have to replace both cards simultaneously.


General notes:

I personally do not like changing cards in the field if I can avoid it. I expect more failures and accidental data loss will happen by doing that than by actual card failure. I say this despite having a long history of failed computer hardware. I especially do not like handling SD cards because they seem to be far less robust than CF cards.

If you swap cards often enough then hopefully you have developed a system that minimises the risk of accidental data loss, but if you do it rarely then you can expect to make costly mistakes such as formatting the wrong card.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Well now, Alan, I understand that the 4GB SD cards work too with some limitations.

Nil toulme wrote "Only caveat is you can't *format* the 4GB SD in camera. Mostly it just doesn't work, but there have been two or three reports of camera mungement when that is attempted, so don't even try it."

http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=832&highlight=card

That means one should be able to have duplicate files up to 4GB.

Now I wonder whether the new 8GB SD cards will work if they are formatted on the computer and what specifications does one use? I always format in-camera only!

I try to change cards, at quiet intervals, before they are full, so when the next burst of activity comes, I have the maximum number of shots available.

Asher
 

Alan T. Price

New member
not only is the SD capacity unsupported by Canon, you would also be risking the purchase of a card that may not be supported by the new standard and perhaps the new firmware. What if the new firmware managed to lose the capability to support the existing high capacity cards that are formatted in the camera ? My advice is that it isn't worth the risk of having an unuseable SD card by buying one now when the camera firmware is expected to be changed relatively soon.
 

Nill Toulme

New member
I think I read something that indicated 4GB is the limit for the unsupported SD cards. Can't think what that would be though. Seems like if you can kludge FAT32 addressing at all it should work on anything, but that sort of thing is over my head by a long shot.

And I *think* the RAW on CF, jpg on SD setting is only available on the N, not on the II. No?

As for the "risk," well, we're only paying $65 for these 4GB SD's, so as long as we don't blow up our cameras the risk isn't all that great, while the convenience is.

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Nill Toulme said:
And I *think* the RAW on CF, jpg on SD setting is only available on the N, not on the II. No?
JohanElzenga said:
Unfortunately, that is correct.

Could be corrected in firmware? I wish someone wrote a firmware update program to bipass these silly restrictions!

Is there any price to pay in writing speed when two cards get the same data simultaniously?

Asher
 

John_Nevill

New member
I tried the dual card writing but really didn't see any benefits of it, for the following reasons:

a) I'm not a pro and my images aren't client critical.
b) I never shoot in jpeg
c) I only use high quality media since being caught out using cheap stuff, which turned out to be fake! Although did get some lovely mosaic images from them :O)

Up to now i've only used 2GB cards in both slots, a 4GB CF arrived yesterday, but i'm reluctant to put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak.

On a slighty off topic, I wish the 1DN would automatically move to the 2nd card when the 1st is full. Again a simple firmware revison would suffice.

BTW, I think the 1DN writes faster to SD than CF.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
John,

It surprises me that Canon has yet to implement auto switching to the next card!

I wonder why no software guru/geek/nerd/genius/kind guy has tackled the firmware issue.

That would, IMHO, be one of the best inventions yet for the DSLR. After all, we can write software for everything else! Imagine all the nice things we could think up with an open source firmware module!!

Asher
 
John_Nevill said:
Up to now i've only used 2GB cards in both slots, a 4GB CF arrived yesterday, but i'm reluctant to put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak.
I have moved to a 4 GB RiData card (~$80 USD + shipping) with 2 1 GB cards as backup and have had no issues with the first 100 GB or so (excepting nearly filling all my cards one evening). I should note I use an XT (not a 1D*) and only shoot RAW. Truth be told, the only CF card errors I have had were single files being corrupted and that is about 4 or 5 shots in 15,000. I can accept a 0.1% error rate as I am a prolific shooter. Such an error rate may not be my first choice, but I cannot imagine sacrificing the lenses I could buy that would expand the limits of what I could capture in the name of other things (more FPS, more MP, ...). This is not to say I would not like those features, but until I have $20,000 USD in lenses I cannot make the case for a 1 series body.

But my general computing impression is that CF cards are generally robust even though I have had a a bad CF card before. I have found hard drives far less reliable and always copy CF cards to two drives (well, CF card to drive A and then drive A to drive B due to time).

At the end, I would love to have 4 or 5 4 GB CF cards as that would let me shoot for a day unhindered by extra weight.

some thoughts,

Sean
 

BobSmith

New member
It surprises me that Canon has yet to implement auto switching to the next card!

Many of the Kodak DSLRs had this feature. The first I owned that had it was a 330 (in '98 maybe?). All of the 7xx models had it as did the 14n series. Extremely useful feature. With the much smaller cards popular when these cameras came out you didn't have to worry about hitting the end of the card right in the middle of an important sequence. The camera would just switch to the second card and keep going. You'd see a message on the LCD to let you know you were now on the other card. Then you could swap out the first card when you had time. When the second filled, the camera would switch back to the now empty first card.

I was appalled that Kodak dumped the duplicate card slots in the 14n in favor of one SD and one Compact Flash. I could use the SD card for overflow if the compact flash filled, but the cards were so slooooow (that seems to have changed now) that it wasn't practical to shoot to them regularly if you were used to fast Compact Flash cards. The 14n would also write duplicate images files (either JPEG or RAW) to both cards at once but that also slowed the camera to a crawl compared to just Compact Flash shooting.
 

Nill Toulme

New member
Sean DeMerchant said:
.... I have found hard drives far less reliable and always copy CF cards to two drives (well, CF card to drive A and then drive A to drive B due to time).
Sean, have a look at Breeze Downloader Pro (PC only). Among its many other useful features, it will automatically download your cards to two separate locations.


At the end, I would love to have 4 or 5 4 GB CF cards as that would let me shoot for a day unhindered by extra weight.
With 4GB 150x Ridata CF's now at $57 (newegg price after $15 rebate) — less than $15/gig — that's hardly out of reach any more.

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net
 
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