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DAVE sounds awefully like a Digital Wallet which I had several years ago. It had a PCMCIA interface for you to plug cards into, but it was incredibly useful. It used Firewire for connection to the PC so was very fast too (faster than DAVE, probably). It was only 6GB though.

I guess that was ahead of it's time. It worked wonderfully for me.

IIRC, it was produced by a company called "Minds At Work" - which seems to be http://www.mindsatwork.net/, but it isn't loading for me (I'm in China, so it's not unusual) :| Is it still around?

Ah, here's DPReview's page on it : http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/digitalwallet/

It's a shame when good products don't make it, only to be successful later for some other company :(

I'm a bit surprised by your comments. 256Mb CF cards are now down to 24p/Mb (£60 from dabs.com), and I wonder how many of these you would need for a two week holiday. I'd imagine the average user would only get through one or two (depending on the size/quality of your photos). For instance, a 3mp picture at normal compression quality on my camera tends to come in at about 600k. I could fit >400 pictures on a single 256Mb CF card.

Even 'fine' quality jpegs are only around 1,200k - giving you 200 pictures/card.

If you're an avid photographer, I'd have thought you could spend the cash on a couple of 1Gb microdrives (£200/each).

I suppose if you want to store all your pictures uncompressed, you're looking at up to about 20Mb/picture, which is when current CF will not suffice, but then solutions to that problem already exist - see The Digital Wallet.

However, I don't think the number of people who will only take photos uncompressed is very high - I think CF works fine for the vast majority.

Perhaps I'm underestimating the number of photos an avid photgrapher would take in two weeks?

Don't take the laptop; it's fraught with temptations for things you probably shouldn't do on your honeymoon (and I don't just mean pr0n).

But you do want to take a digital camera; and you don't want to run out of 'film.' So get a digital wallet, like the Terapin Mine, or the Minds@Work MindStor or Digital Wallet.

These pictures are 4 megs apiece and obviously I need a good chunk of storage when I go shooting in the field, but I rarely delete any pictures. Whenever I get back to my car or hotel room I simply dump everything to my laptop and wipe the memory cards. A Digital Wallet would serve the same purpose.

I label my laptop harddisk photo folders like so: /foto/2001-10-27-b-d1 Meaning this folder contains D1 photos, the second set (b) of pictures dumped on the 27th of October 2001. This directory naming scheme is easy to work with. I use ACDsee to generate a thumbnails contact sheet for each folder.

Once I get back home I dump my laptop foto folder to CD-roms, using ACDsee to make contact sheets of all the photos.

The CD-roms go into Caselogic binders, and each CD is numbered and labeled with the range of dates and locations covered. Copies of the CD-rom folder contact sheets are kept on the laptop harddisk for easy browsing, and permits me to easily find the binder and CD-rom containing the picture I wanted to retrieve.

Presently I have some 30,000 photos in my collection. It would be a heck of a lot more bulky and cumbersome maintaining a comparable library of slides or 35mm negatives.

One obvious use is for folks w/ digital cameras, c.f. Digital Wallet. It is more expensive, but does a whole lot more, and far more flexible.

Now if I could only get PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL/Apache to run on this thing...

Another possiblity, which, while it does not fall in your price range, but could prove far more useful is the Digital Wallet, from Minds@Work. I was thinking of picking up one of these for me. It holds 6GB of data, has a PCMCIA slot and USB connectors (works with Macs or Win98/2000). Only downside is the cost (nearly $500). However, consider that today, many universities are requiring students to purchase notebooks that cost on the order of $1500-3000. This is 1/3-1/6 that cost, solves your storage problems, and is pretty cool to boot.
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I'd run across the Digital Wallet yesterday and was goin to mention it. I haven't even seen a unit but it sounds like it would server as a temporary image store. Get a couple of huge PCMCIA cards so you don't have to swap them often, then dump them to a Digital Wallet or a Laptop PC.

I do alot of digital photography. (Kodak DC210+) I've setup a cheep 486 laptop so when you plug in a compactflash card it copies all the pictures off of it and deletes them from the card after a sucessfull copy. It then shuts down. All I have to do is stick the compact flash card in the adapter card, stick it into the laptop then boot the laptop. All the rest is automatic. I even have it beep when it's done so I know when it's safe to remove the compact flash card.

As for reliability of cards. ??? What's up? Them things are tough. I've stepped on them and not dammaged them. One rule of thumb, never force them into the socket. If it resists then flip and try again. You don't want to put them in backwards, seriously suboptimal.

For off camera storage you will need to look at the profesional SLR models. I know a couple of them are designed to dump over a SCSI bus to a HD array. Mainly designed for studio work.

Another thing to look at is camera capture software. I know some camers are able to be controled over their serial link. This includes taking a shot then immediatly downloading it. I don't know how prevalent this feature is, but if you had a USB hooked up camera you could easily do this and download 4M shots every couple seconds.

Check out the Digital Wallet by Mindsatwork. It has some flaws, but if you have time to upload pictures between filling a disk or an assistant who can do it for you, then this looks like a good option:

MindsAtWork
Digital Wallet FAQ
Digital Wallet Review

I don't have anything to do with any of the above companies/sites. I am just a digital camera enthusiast who likes backpacking (and thus is looking for a similar solution, but compact). I am waiting for the second generation of these devices after reading the reviews though.

Check out the Digital Wallet by Mindsatwork. It has some flaws, but if you have time to upload pictures between filling a disk or an assistant who can do it for you, then this looks like a good option:

MindsAtWork
Digital Wallet FAQ
Digital Wallet Review

I don't have anything to do with any of the above companies/sites. I am just a digital camera enthusiast who likes backpacking (and thus is looking for a similar solution, but compact). I am waiting for the second generation of these devices after reading the reviews though.