Cloud, or not
 

Hi,

Apologies if this has been done to death already, but I couldn't find the info I need when I searched.

I'm going to Australia and New Zealand for about six weeks. I'll be taking an Insta360. a Panasonic Compact camera and a DJI Osmo Action 5. My concern is storing the footage from the action cameras. I know that Insta have a cloud based solution, but the biggest they offer is 2Tb. This worries me as I brough back half a Tb when I took a couple of GoPros to Bulgaria, and the Insta files are much bigger.

What solutions do people use when they are on the road? I am thinking cloud based or taking a laptop and some external hard drives.

TIA

Ian

The non-technical questions:

1) Are you a videographer and is this a video production trip as its main purpose? I.e. how much time out of your trip are you expecting to spend on setting up and getting good shots, rather than enjoying the surroundings yourself?

2) What are you going to do with the footage once you get back? Are you commissioned to do a video that someone will pay you for? Do you already have a popular channel? Or are you going to spend massive amounts of time editing one more travel video that will get 358 views on youtube? :)

The technical responses:

3) Any cloud solution, no matter how much space, will strongly depend on your upload speeds and capacity. Are you sure you will have a powerful uplink in your hotel WiFi to dump hundreds of gigs of footage in a reasonable time, and/or will your local SIM card's traffic limits hold up to it?

4) If you want loads of online storage space for cheap, look into things like Amazon Glacier - but will be a lot less automated than the gadget maker's own online solution.

5) Google Drive will happily sell you terabytes and terabytes of space on an expensive monthly plan (https://one.google.com/about/plans) and it has the advantage that you can just dump the files onto your main device - including an Android phone - and it will gradually back it up to the cloud in the background whenever you have a connection. Apple's iCloud and Microsoft's OneDrive will do the same for their respective platforms, for a cost.

6) ...SD cards are cheap. Get them in bulk and swap them out as they fill up. No faffing with dumping to an external hard drive every night.

I'd just buy a 1Kg brick of (comparatively) small capacity SD Cards if it was me, and view any cloud storage as a backup only, assuming you'll have good internet for uploading all the time.

That being said, I don't personally take any video while motorbike riding, just a handful of photos to remember highlights and pretty things :mchappy:

I travel with dji Osmo Action 4, dji Mini 3 drone, Canon PowerShot SX720HS.

I bought 256GB SD cards for £18 each directly from Kingston, as they are the cheapest recommended by dji. One card takes a lot to fill it. If you're brave enough, post them home every time you get to civilization, or simply pack them nicely.

The PowerShot doesn't accept 256, but is coping on a 32, which I then use a spare phone and a microSD adapter to copy onto a 256SD card.

The Action is on my helmet, you can set it to take photos every now and then, or video. If you could afford it, get a remote. That way your videos are only the interesting bits. Keep them short (smaller files).

I hire 2TB for £7.99/month from Google, their photos app backs up for me. You've got to watch it tho as it will eat anything, so I ride on flight mode, then off flight mode when I stop, for as long as I need catch up. Also limit the amount it can chew a day.

I figure it's online backup, frees my phone space, I can cancel once I get home and get the photos off. Bear in mind you need a desktop computer to get bulk photos off google, they don't make it easy, but they are storing original quality.

I'll have 3200+ photos by the end of this trip.https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...e26d582801.jpghttps://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...7ea27dac4b.jpg

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The pro strat (and my next gadget) is an Insta360 Go 3S (or whatever is the newest version by the time you are reading this). The camera itself is small enough that you can actually mount it inside your helmet, looking out the visor - literally your own point of view - and the charging case has a screen that you can flip up towards yourself as a remote/monitor. Needs a 3D printed mount for the helmet though.

You can flip a switch in settings so it will only ever back up on wifi, not on mobile data.

What are you going to do with them?

I started off with the idea of using Polar Steps app, which gives you the opportunity to have the captured photos / writeup printed in a travel coffee table book, but polar steps is not letting me add photos to previous steps or to future as yet to be planned steps so I gave up.

I'll probably assemble them myself into a wee book, but also create videos from them mixed in with helmet cam footage, and post it on my YouTube channel (2wheels one horizon).

I must have had 200,000 photos over the years, but who likes slideshows? Now Google photos has them

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Taking hard drives with you is probably the best solution. M.2 based USB connected drive of 4 TB can be bought (where I am) for less than 300 USD. Takes less space than a camera and is reliable unless drowned or hit directly with a heavy object.
If you want online storage. Register a website with one of many hosting providers (godaddy etc.). For very little for the first year you get up to 40 gb of online storage. Amazon prime members can get some free photo storage (but you pay for prime). Google drive has been mentioned. Apple also has online storage. Even Microsoft is in the online storage game with their OneDrive.
The good thing about online storage is that you can start small and expand if you need more. The bad thing is possible access issues.

The thing about that is then you have a single point of failure for a lot of information. That's why I like lots of SD cards, if one breaks you haven't lost loads of stuff ... plus they're small enough to pack in a more flexible manner or put in the post, and they're a more physically durable than even the best HDDs or SSDs