Camera, code, coffee

Little Backup Box has been by far my most successful and popular project. But about two years ago, I chose to transfer it to a new maintainer, effectively abandoning the project. The other day, it occurred to me that I had never said a proper good-bye to my project. So here it goes.

As it often happens, I started working on the project to solve a problem I had: I didn't want to schlep around a laptop when traveling, but I wanted to have a backup solution to keep my photos safe. As Raspberry Pi had been making waves as a versatile platform for all kinds of projects, I thought I'd try to build a Raspberry Pi-based backup appliance that would replace a proper laptop. And over the years, various Raspberry Pi models running Little Backup Box served me well during my travels.

In which we eat trapizzini, take photos of Cinquecentos, enjoy the quaint charm of Orvieto, gawk at a skull with ears in Naples, and eat more trapizzini.

If only an iPad or an iPhone could run Linux tools like Rsync, ExifTool, ImageMagick, etc., you wouldn't have to schlep around a Linux notebook when traveling, especially if your photographic needs are limited to keeping your photos and RAW files safe.

Enter iSH, an app that bestows Linux powers on Apple devices. Once installed, iSH offers a Linux environment that gives you access to a plethora of Linux tools. More importantly, iSH can access the iPadOS and iOS file systems and external storage devices connected to the iPad or the iPhone. This means that you can run commands and scripts in iSH to back up data from a storage card connected to the Apple device. Better still, if you use a USB-C hub that features both a card reader and USB connectors, you can back up data directly from a card to an external USB storage device, bypassing the iPad's or iPhone's internal storage.