P-5000 is adequate, but backup is a pain

I’m heading to Europe soon and I didn’t want to lug my laptop. So I bought a P-5000 to backup photos from my Nikon D200. The Epson works great, the display is very nice, the ergonomics are adequate, and, in general, it is about what I expected. It is a little on the expensive side, but I decided the convenience outweighed the cost. The only problem: if you don’t trust digital storage devices and you want to backup the P-5000 to an external USB hard drive, you are in for some hassles.

First, the P-5000 USB port for plugging in an external drive is not powered. This means that your external hard drive will need an independent power source (i.e., yet another power adapter cord). Most small backup hard drives these days get their power from the device they are plugged into via the USB connection. But not when you are hooked to the P-5000.

.flame on
What was Epson thinking??!! Why did they put a dead USB connection on this device? I paid $600 and would have gladly paid an extra $10-$25 for a powered USB connection. Perhaps there is a good technical reason for this oversight. But if they just did it to save money, it’s dumb, Dumb, DUMB!!
.flame off

The other problem is that the P-5000 will only back up to hard drives formatted as FAT32. If you are running Windows, you can only format 32GB FAT32 partitions – not much good for backing up an 80GB device like the P-5000. So what to do? Of course the answer is to borrow your friend’s Mac – they format FAT32 drives with no size restrictions. (There are probably the ingredients for a Mac advertisement here someplace).

It took me several hours and two calls to Epson tech support to figure all this out. A couple of times I was on the verge of taking it back to the store, but I hung in there.