Photography and videography make up a large part of my trips around the world with a typical week long trip generating 100-200GB of files. I would normally choose between my netbook or MacBookPro based on the amount of luggage and airline limitations. The netbook provides a very basic mechanism to back up the files – it’s not even capable of playing back footage from my Canon EOS 7D
So, with the impending launch of the iPad
So, I tried to write a simple app that could be run from SpringBoard which would either mount or unmount a connected drive (as per Maxwell’s instructions). Unfortunately, that was a no go – no matter how I tried to execute the shell commands nothing would mount. Now, given that I would have my iPhone in close proximity the simple answer was to use a SSH client from the iPhone to execute the commands remotely – while on the same wifi network. All you have to do is install something like TouchTerm (MobileTerm is not yet compatible with the iPad) and create a connection for Home (i.e. 127.0.0.1 with the usual root credentials).
As I chose to purchase the MiFi instead of the 3G iPad, I have an extremely compact wifi router (doesn’t need a 3G signal to create the network) So I simply connect the external drive to my iPad, issue the command from my iPad and then browse, move and organise my files without the need of the bulky MacBookPro or under powered netbook.
You’ll have to jailbreak your iPad – I’ve had this working on both 4.2 and 4.3 betas. iFile now behaves like Finder in OSX and will display the attached drive as a Flash Drive (with eject icon), so you can skip the SSH steps mentioned in the Maxwell C Shay article. This greatly simplifies the copying and moving of files to and from GoodReader.
So far I’ve had this working fine with SDHC cards from my Kodak Zi8
