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If you own a digital camera you know the headaches which can be caused by running out of storage for digital photos on your memory cards. You also know it isn't too hard to accidentally erase all of your photos off of your camera before you have a chance to download them to your home PC. One category of products – digital photo storage devices – helps to resolve that problem by letting you offload your photos to what is essentially an external hard drive.

Digital Foci is one such company which makes these type of products. Its new Photo Safe II device, priced at around $140 for an 80GB model or $190 for a 160GB unit, is the latest such product to hit the market. Its key focus is to back up and secure your digital photos from your camera. It is a relatively compact device, weighing 0.6 pounds and measuring 4.6- x 3- x 0.8-inches. It runs off a rechargeable battery, which lasts for about 80 minutes between charges. An auto shut off feature helps save this battery life.

The Photo Safe II sports built-in memory card slots, offering support for a variety of media card formats including CF Type I (including Extreme III, IV, UDMA), SD (including SDHC), miniSD, MMC, MS, MS Duo, MS PRO Duo, and xD-Picture. A one-touch button on the digital photo storage device lets you copy the entire contents of the card at speeds up to 5MB/sec. Digital Foci says a 1GB card can therefore be copied in about 3-1/2 minutes.

All file formats are copied onto this device, retaining the original file name as you or the camera created it. The Photo Safe II has a display screen on it, showing you information such as status, battery life, storage space and copying status. You can also copy digital pictures over later to a computer via a USB 2.0 connection.

Other features of the Photo Safe II from Digital Foci include a built-in erase card function, the ability to act as an external hard drive/memory card reader when attached to a computer and support for both Macs and PCs.