Shortcut to Copy SD Card to External SSD

Full disclosure: Purchasing any of the items using the links below will give a small percentage of the sale to my wife.

Each time I go on vacation, I have to come up with a strategy for backing up my photos I take on my cameras. In the past, I used a RavPower FileHub (link is for the exact same product with different branding), a travel router that has a built-in SD card slot and USB port, to copy all of my camera’s SD cards to a portable hard drive connected via USB. I’ve been using this system was since 2017, and it’s worked really well. Even though the RavPower app was kinda clunky, it worked on my iPad and I was able to copy any SD card to the external hard drive without much effort. The issue that I had with the RavPower FileHub was it’s built-in 6700 mAh lithium ion battery. While it’s awesome that you could use this tiny routeer anywhere without electricity, it also meant that I needed to bring it in my carry-on bag, as I couldn’t check it in my suitcase when flying due to airline regulations. I already had an external battery powerbank, and didn’t want to carry the router around to replace it.

I decided to replace the RavPower with a TP-Link AC750 Wireless Portable Nano Travel Router because it was much lighter in weight, had no internal battery, and had 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz wi-fi connectivity. Unfortunately, this router has neither a built-in SD card reader nor automated file copy functionality built-in. This meant I had to figure out a way to copy photos from my camera’s SD cards to my external SSD.

This is duck soup on macOS, but I only bring my iPad Pro with me on vacation, so I had to find a solution that worked on my iPad Pro. Since the Files app on iOS has gotten a lot better in the last few years, I decided to see if I could use it to copy files from the SD card to an SSD. Luckily, I already had the Hyperdrive 6-in-1 USB-C Hub, and that had all the ports that I needed to test this workflow out. It worked, but there was one more issue: copying files on iOS is… well… very clunky. Selecting multiple files in the Files app is a pain and I couldn’t imagine doing it every single time I had to copy photos from an SD card during my vacation. So… I decided to write a Shortcut to do it for me.

The Shortcut starts off by asking you to choose a folder. This should be your SD card. I usually select the actual folder on the SD card that contains all of the jpegs and raw files, but you can choose any folder you want. 

Next, the Shortcut will ask what camera the source files are from. On this vacation, I brought three cameras along, so they’re presented in a selectable list. When selecting the camera, it uses this info for the name of the folder, making it easier to identify which camera took the images.The Shortcut also appends the current date and time to the folder name in order to give each folder a unique name.

Once that’s done, it copies the files from the source (SD card) to the destination (SSD drive). To make sure all of the files got copied, I attempted to do some sort of checksum or error correction. I attempted to use MD5, but I found that it took way too long when copying hundreds of files. I decided to do a simple count of the files in the source folder and then compare it to the file count found in the destination folder. If they were the same, then everything should have been copied over. If they were different, an alert would appear. I’m not sure if this is the best way to do it, but it seems to work.

Feel free to change up this Shortcut to suit your needs. Hopefully someone will find it useful.

Download the Copy Files on SD Card to External Drive Shortcut [Compatible with macOS and iOS]