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How Do You Manage Your SD Card Library?
txmadman writes "Like a lot of my colleagues and all of my three children, I have several SD , mini-SD, and micro-SD cards for various purposes: cameras, cell phones, my laptop, etc. These things are handy to have around, offer easy and significant storage, but are very easily lost. We have also have run into some instances where it wasn't clear whose SD card was whose, and have also started to see a need for a storage mechanism. I have seen SD card 'wallets' and such, but have never seen anyone actually use one. So: How do you manage and keep track of your SD cards?"
Put labels on them and keep them in a credit card pocket of your wallet.
This is seriously not a difficult enough problem to warrant a /. story..
holds a whole bunch of them.
It's not a new concept... labeling media goes all the way back to cassette tapes. (Eight tracks are before my time, were they writeable?)
I leave them in their damn slot.. be it camera, phone, vibrator, etc... no need to keep multiple ones around... save the data, or delete! jeez... lame noobs....
I keep the cards with the device I use them most with.
MicroSD - my phone or GPS
SD - Point and click camera
CF - SLR
Oh and chuck smaller capacity cards as you replace them (like the ones that they ship with cameras and fit 3 images). They're worse than useless - they're a distraction (possibly at a crucial time in photography).
I find I don't need thousands of SD cards. I probably have 20 SD cards and 10 CF cards.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Plug them in a PC, move everything over to the PC, reformat the card. Now they are all identical and it doesn't matter who they belong to or if you lose them. Why do you ask ? Incidentaly I use the following Linux/Cygwin script to sort out the files.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I horde my digital media! People. Do. Not. Touch. My. Stuff.
Family members taking personal responsibility to know what is theirs and where it is is the only solution. There is no technological substitute for plain-old responsible living.
Putting labels on cards if they know they'll forget is part of that. Putting their things in their specific corners of the shared domicile are manditory. I infest my bedroom and my computer desk. My dad inhabits his desk of the study and his side of the master bedroom. My brother floats between the sofa, the piano, and his room. My mom Supremely Controls the rest of the house, and of course has jurisidiction as to the aesthetics of everyone else's little corners.
Do what you (hopefully) learned in kindergarten! Put things back where you found them! Develop habits! My keys always go with my wallet and phone and PDA on the articulating arm base of my computer monitor. I never wonder where they are: they're either on me, where they belong, or stolen.
Life is very simple when you take responsibility. It's all black and white, easy to differentiate, and on the whole much more pleasant.
Consider yourself spoken to.
I haven't found a need to have more than one SD card per device - that is, one in the camera, one in the Wii (to back up the WiiWare), etc. You just empty them onto your computer every so often (this doesn't work for the Wii, but that hasn't filled up anyway, and it doesn't look likely to anytime soon).
Treat your SD cards as garbage! No kidding!
You do this by using a hard disk copy as the "master", and copying to and from SD, considering that the SD is always "ephemeral", and may get bent, may pop out of the device and be stepped on and lost, etc. So, it is never the host for any critical data for very long.
And you make darned sure to back up the disk. These days my short-term backup medium is a couple of 1G or larger SATA disks, which I place in a front-loading holder and put in the fire safe after they're written. Long-term backup media is currently DVD, but will probably go to Blu-Ray when the media gets cheap enough. Some of these are stored in a relative's closet, because having all of your backups in one building is stupid.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Like a lot of my colleagues and all of my three children, I have several white, black, and blue pairs of socks for various purposes: school, work, dress, etc. These things are handy to have around, offer easy and significant comfort, but are very easily lost. We have also have run into some instances where it wasn't clear whose socks were whose, and have also started to see a need for a storage mechanism. I have seen sock 'drawers' and such, but have never seen anyone actually use one. So: How do you manage and keep track of your socks?
Fire safes are generally designed to keep their contents below the combustion point of paper. Hard drives will melt at much, much cooler temperatures.
Dump them to hard disk, RAID array, what not; then threat the physical media as transient and/or a backup.
That way you can also index electronically and what not.
I have a 6 MP digital camera, with a 4 GB card in it. I also have an old 1GB card, but I almost never use it - 4 GB is enough for me to take hundreds of pics and a few hours of VHS-quality video with no complaints. So I download my pics and stuff to my laptop every month or so, and it takes about 3 minutes - less than it takes to drive to my local Rite-Aid photo booth. (which is about 1.5 miles away!)
I think a 4 GB card costs about $10 nowadays, if even that much. And I say "buy big" but 4 GB is pretty ho-hum nowadays. 4x the space costs just $25.
Seriously, who cares? How many pictures do you TAKE?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
4 gig cards are not that expensive and they hold an amazing amount of stuff. Probably 8 gig cards will be pretty standard in a year or two. So just get the largest cards you can afford and you won't need to have lots of extra ones lying around.
My camera case has about 5 SD cards ranging from 512 megs to 2 gigs, and I really could replace them all with one or two 4GB cards. That's a lot of pictures (but we take a lot of video clips too).
Why someone needs extra SD cards for a phone is beyond me. My 512 meg micro sd is larger than I would ever want in my flip phone. I guess a smart phone with a 3 megapixel camera would warrant something more capacious. So a 4 gig card should do it.
This is really not rocket science. It's like those people who used to ask, how large a hard disk should I get with my new PC? Well, the answer was, and still is, as large as you can afford.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Don't flame me but... have you ever thought of actually trying one of those SD card "wallets" you mentioned? o.O
It seems to me that you posted a possible solution along with your question...
I only have one SD card.
When it's full, I move the files off onto a large data filing and storage system that came with my PC (called a 'hard disk'). That renders the SD card empty again, and I can start filling it with data, photographs, video etc., and then repeat the process.
The PC's 'hard disk' can be accessed by an 'operating system' which has lots of functionality that allows you to easily organise the data into hierarchical 'folders', making it easy to keep track of the contents.
There. Solved that problem for you. Next?
All of my various memory cards and flash drives, when not actively in use in a device, reside in a giant coffee cup on my desk.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I have several SD , mini-SD, and micro-SD cards for various purposes: cameras, cell phones, my laptop, etc. [...] How do you manage and keep track of your SD cards?"
I have a two-stage plan, which I thought was a fairly common technique:
1. Make sure my flash cards have sufficient memory that I will not need to switch between cards for the same device. You know, 1000 full quality photos or whatever.
2. Leave the cards in their devices and keep track of the devices by normal means.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
I stored the info in a database on another SD card.
However I mislabeled it and lost it.
If a few SD cards leaves you confused...
No sig today...
Since you mentioned the SD card wallets, why not buy one and tell us if they help?
I agree that keeping track of memory cards isn't that difficult (I even actually use a card wallet for some of them - they work fine), especially if you label the cards....
On the other hand - the rest of your argument is fairly meaningless given the basic question as you don't know the usage patterns of the person asking the question (and which unfortunately wasn't supplied) - and just assume things.
For one thing - 'on 8 2-gig cards' kind of warrants the question on the best way to organise them as you are talking about sizable number of cards.
On the other side - you just say '800 20 megapixel RAW images on 16GB(8*2GB)' sounds like an 'impressive' number, but it really isn't - for one thing the size of the raw images depends on more than just 20megapixel - I get ~1000 12megapixel RAW images on 2 8GB cards (at 14bpp). And while even a 1000 images sounds an impressive number - my 5 8GB cards weren't quite enough for a week in Istanbul (in total there I took about 55GB worth of photos). How much you can fit on what cards really depends on the actual usage pattern. Just that I shoot almost exclusively in RAW doesn't mean everyone else does...
The only good tip I could give someone who juggles around with many cards - apart from labelling them, is to use card wallets and place cards depending on whether they are ready to use (empty) or full: simply put them with the label facing towards you if the cards are empty, and with the label facing away from you if they're full. That way it's easy to keep track of which cards in your wallet you can still use to take more images, and which cards are already full...
Don't use SD cards for long term storage. Use them for capture only.
Having a wireless Network Attached Storage is a great way for all the family to store, without having to use just one computer for access. We have a 4TB Terastation Pro for the family - and HDV, DV, RAW, and JPG capture is stored there. Getting used to uploading a shoot as soon as arriving (back from holiday, or an event) didn't take so long. When going on holidays that will use more than a couple of 16G SDHC cards, we label them A-G and writelock them once they are finished. We writelock our DV/HDV tapes also. And we use a separate storage for empty cards/tapes than we do for filled cards/tapes.
If your holidays are not remote, you can always use commercial online storage as a temporary cache. Also secure network connections to your own NAS is not really very hard to set up if you belong to the standard slashdot demographic.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
I have seen SD card 'wallets' and such, but have never seen anyone actually use one.
Be the first on your block. Start a trend.
Back when a 20MB hard drive was still a big capacity and everyone had zillions of floppy disks to manage I had a teacher give me a piece of advice I still live by:
If the disk contents aren't important enough to justify the tiny effort of labeling the disk then treat the disk as if it is blank.
Saves a lot of hand wringing about whether the files on the disk are important. If it wasn't important enough to take the very simple measure of writing a brief description of the contents of then you probably didn't need the contents anyway. If by some chance you did need the contents your organizational skills/system suck and you deserve the consequences.
The problem should never be organizing SD cards however. The problem should be organizing and backing up the photos once you have downloaded the contents to your PC. Even if a photographer has 30+ SD (or equivalent) cards with him for a shoot, the contents should not remain on those cards for long after the shoot is done.
I don't find physical devices too hard to keep track of, but which slot are they attached to on the workstation? I find it easier to keep track if I add an Autorun.inf file and an icon (image.ico) to the root directory of the card or stick or whatever. I have never had problems with these files in the desitination device (camera, Mac, Zaurus etc.) but they make handling stuff on the PC which has a lot of attached devices a lot easier. You can iconise pictures with Irfanview - a 16x16 pixel block is all you need, and I guess anything distinctive will do (but I like to make 'em pretty!). The text in your Autorun.inf should look something like: [autorun] icon=image.ico label=Corsair stick (4GB) - you can add your name to the label if that helps sort out ownership.
So where do the socks go - do they hide in the washing machine? The drier? In someone else's sock drawer?
The dryer does actually eat them. Some years ago, our drier died. I thought..."ok, I'll take it apart and salvage any useful parts. motor, pulleys, etc".
Upon taking the drum out...there was literally a double handful of singleton socks inside the box, and a coupla dollars in coins.
Eric Baird
I had this problem and realized that the amount of time I spent sorting socks was ridiculous. The solution? Flatten your socks down to 1 or 2 types (white and black) and now the sorting problem goes away. Anytime your socks start developing holes or you feel you need to replace them, throw out the entire batch and buy all identical ones. By now you don't even have to pair up the socks when sorting the laundry. Just throw them in the drawer/basket and you're done.