Support for Sony .ARW format / multiple sd card transfer

Hardware Little Backup Box
1

Hi there,

Have a few questions here:

  1. Does gPhoto 2 support the .ARW format? Can’t seem to find it in the documentation.

  2. Is it possible to insert 2 full SD cards and have it auto-transfer to my Samsung T5 SSD?

3, Will there be any benefit in transfer speed if i buy 2GB Ram vs 1GB for Raspberry Pi 4B?

  1. Can I use a non-PD charger (e.g. Huawei 25W supercharge) to power the 4B and run Little Backup?

  2. Is it possible to specify the folder (e.g. 100MSDCF only) to auto-transfer? If yes, how?

  3. How do I view the contents of my SSD (after transfer) to verify the transfer is 100% correct? Will be even better if I can view the transfer progress remotely (on my P30 Pro)

2

Hello,

  1. Support in which way?

  2. It’s possible to use multiple SD cards with Little Backup Box. You can configure Little Backup Box to work with an external hard drive, but this may require some tweaking.

  3. Good question! I don’t know. :slight_smile:

  4. It should work, but there is really no way to say for sure.

  5. No. Little Backup Box backs up the entire contents of the card.

  6. Little Backup Box comes with the Samba and UPnP servers. You can use a UPnP client on your Android device to view the transferred photos.

3

I have used darktable’s tethering feature with a Sony camera to capture .ARW raw files. This feature uses gphoto2 behind the scenes, so it seems safe to say ARW is supported.

4

gphoto doesn’t support file types per se, rather it supports cameras. Check the gphoto2 docs to see if your camera is supported.

5

Hi Dmitri,

  1. Support for auto-backup of .ARW files (from Sony A7R2, SD card in card reader, not in camera) to my Samsung T5 SSD

  2. Where can I find a guide to get this set up properly?

Thanks!

6

I believe if you put the SD card in the card slot, rsync is used to transfer the files. So you should be fine.

7

The backup command used is this line

rsync -avh --info=progress2 --exclude “*.id” “$CARD_MOUNT_POINT”/ “$BACKUP_PATH”

it backs up every thing on the source storage that does not exist on the destination storage except any files with the extension

.id

so you should not need to change anything to get it to backup any raw file format on your SD card.

Power supplies and external hard drives can be a little inter related. The power supply that you can successfully use is difficult to predict exactly. The recommended Pi power supply is known to work reliably however in lots of situation you could possibly use a supply with a lower rated current. But you will only know when you’ve gone too low because of unreliable operation of the Pi or card corruption or similar bad results. Your chosen power supply needs to supply the current that the Pi needs + the source SD cards power requirements + the power that backup storage needs. Unless you know exactly these three values its not possible to calculate the minimum amperage you can get away with.

External backup drives may draw more current from the USB connector than the Pi is happy to supply unless you use an external drive with its own power supply ( kind of defeats the purpose of having a small minimal backup solution).