I was once faced with the issue of not having my laptop near me to download my Compact Flash (CF) cards to. What a drama! You can’t just stop shooting, but at one point I was even considering deleting images on one of my cards to enable me to shoot some more. Now that I’m talking about it, it just sounds crazy!

So off I went to  look for something that might fix the problem and found something that was very interesting. Nexto, a manufacturer of portable backup storage devices, has announced the NVS2500 backup device claiming to offer back up speeds of up to 80MB/s.

Primarily designed for video professionals, the NVS2500 is compatible with Compact Flash, SDHC and MemoryStick Pro, though its fastest speeds are reserved for SxS media. Built around a 2.5” SATA hard drive, it offers eSATA/USB and FireWire support.

Now you can bring all of your equipment with you, and it doesn’t matter if it uses a CF card or almost any other standard. We travel quite a lot, so forgetting to bring your laptop isn’t inconceivable. And besides, I sometimes prefer to travel light. I can throw this thing into a backpack, and I’ll have virtually unlimited storage. That’s reason enough to get one.

It also allows simultaneous backup to both its internal HD and an external USB hard drive. It also features a 2.4″ preview LCD, rugged construction and a free-fall sensor for maximum drive protection (which, trust me, I’m going to use). The NVS2500 is available in 160GB, 250GB, 350GB and 500GB storage capacities.

I’m not sure if we’ll be able to source these locally, but I’ll be looking for them at B&H or some other online retailer. I’m not going to let that happen again.

Coming up I have a small review on backup of local and direct attached drives.