Backing up images while travelling?

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zeb

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Trevor
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I going to Iceland next year for 12 days and I’m starting to think about the number of shots I will be taking and how I’m going back them up and was wondering how others have backed their shots while on the road and what you might recommend.

I’m sort of thinking about a netbook at the moment as I could also take all my trip information with me rather than a lot of paper work.

Any thoughts much appreciated
 
Hi Trevor, whenever I'm travelling I take my laptop and a USB remote hard-drive. My routine is to download from my memory cards onto the laptop each evening and then back-up onto the hard drive. I would think using a netbook instead of the laptop would be okay.

Iceland - the country not the shop - is a great place for photographs, I look forward to seeing the results when you return :)
 
Iceland is great for photography, if you get the weather, I have been twice now and the weather had been awful. The Blue Lagoon is well worth a visit on route back to the Airport.

As for backing up, I do a lot of travelling around the world mainly trekking, so weight is important to me. I just take plenty of memory cards, and have a secure waterproof housing to keep them all in, they are all numbered and just use them in turn. I only ever use Scandisk Extreme cards and have never lost any data. Maybe I have just been lucky, but I have no intention of changing my ways.
 
Bristolian said:
Hi Trevor, whenever I'm travelling I take my laptop and a USB remote hard-drive. My routine is to download from my memory cards onto the laptop each evening and then back-up onto the hard drive. I would think using a netbook instead of the laptop would be okay.

Iceland - the country not the shop - is a great place for photographs, I look forward to seeing the results when you return :)
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Thanks Steve don’t think taking laptop is an option due to the weight and size would like to weight to a minimum so I can take more camera gear


Nikon Fan said:
Iceland is great for photography, if you get the weather, I have been twice now and the weather had been awful. The Blue Lagoon is well worth a visit on route back to the Airport.

As for backing up, I do a lot of travelling around the world mainly trekking, so weight is important to me. I just take plenty of memory cards, and have a secure waterproof housing to keep them all in, they are all numbered and just use them in turn. I only ever use Scandisk Extreme cards and have never lost any data. Maybe I have just been lucky, but I have no intention of changing my ways.
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Cheers Barry Memory cards was my first thought but was wondering how many I would need and would the outlay cost be more than a netbook? but I'm thinking you might be right
 
A cheap netbook and a mini external HDD? chances of both failing are extremely slim.
 
I took a net book to the USA with me, I also used it this year traveling europe on the bike, so small enough to pack away, light enough to go in luggage and 250GB of hard drive.
Plus the 32 GB of memory cards I have.

When in America I must have taken about 37GB of pics as all cards where full and I had to delete once saved to net book.

spike
 
Bristolian said:
Hi Trevor, whenever I'm travelling I take my laptop and a USB remote hard-drive. My routine is to download from my memory cards onto the laptop each evening and then back-up onto the hard drive. I would think using a netbook instead of the laptop would be okay.

Iceland - the country not the shop - is a great place for photographs, I look forward to seeing the results when you return :)
Click to expand...

thats what I do :)
a small netbook would not take up much space and I can garentee you will want to have a look at your shots when you get back to the hotel:)
 
Laptop and external hard drive here as a minimum. 2nd laptop and USB memory sticks for additional overkill! I would be pretty upset if I lost my photos, especially if it was from a once-in-a-lifetime trip. A netbook plus one other method should be fine.
 
Laptop here too, and a bunch of cards. I have 2 x 32GB, 2 x 16GB and a couple of 4GB [for the Rx100] - I'm off in 2 weeks to NYC and the plan is not to overwrite any cards. I won't need near that amount, but better safe ... and back them up to the lappy as I go too. Chances are I'll never be there again, for years at least, so i'm not losing any images I shoot there.
 
sarahhj said:
Laptop and external hard drive here as a minimum. 2nd laptop and USB memory sticks for additional overkill! I would be pretty upset if I lost my photos, especially if it was from a once-in-a-lifetime trip. A netbook plus one other method should be fine.
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Thats what I'm worried about would be gutted to lose anything
 
Thanks for all the information, thinking the laptop will be to heavy and bulky so might go the netbook option with a back up hard drive and maybe some memory sticks,
 
Netbook or tablet. And don't forget a card reader (many netbooks and tablets have readers built in but they are almost always for SD rather than CF cards). In the past, I've taken an external HDD as well but I now have larger SD cards so will be keeping them unwiped until I get home. At the moment, memory is cheap so it may be worth expanding your collection of cards.
 
Another thought Trevor, it that I also try to split up the backups to cover for theft. So for our recent trip, laptop(s) were generally left in our hotel room when out and about, but I took my USB memory sticks with me and tended to leave them in the car, and my husband had the external hard drive in his camera bag.
 
I back up to a netbook and a USB hard drive that I carry around in my bag all the time. I've not had a hard drive fail on me in the last 5 years, but it only takes one time to lose everything.
 
Is it just me or are people really paranoid about this, I'm not saying don't back things up ( I do when I'm at home). But when I go on holiday, I go to enjoy myself and bring back photos of the trip, changing memory cards regularly as they fill up and keeping them secure in a sealed container. I have been doing this digitally now for a bout 10 years, and in all that time I have never had a problem, my kit has been frozen in the Himalayan's, soaked in Iceland and cooked in North Africa, but has never failed to recover. Ok I know that one day I may lose a few images, but at least I have not had to carry all this extra kit around with me over the years.
 
I agree. Plenty of cards and keep em safe. Travel a lot to very inhospitable places and carrying enough kit anyway. The other issue is battery power for laptop etc. Not many charging points in the mountains, rainforest or desert.
 
stevepath said:
Not many charging points in the mountains, rainforest or desert.
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That is where I find the battery in my D200 last's for ages, and I carry 4 battery's. 2 years ago Me and the Wife trekked from North Vietnam to South Vietnam in 4 weeks (also taking in some public transport) and the 4 battery's lasted my entire trip, with 15 4gb Sandisk Extreme cards.
 
Barry, I guess it depends on how light you need to travel, where you are going and what the purpose is - everyone is different.

We would always travel with at least one laptop anyway (internet access, document storage, watching films). Our external hard drive isn't much bigger than an iphone and pretty light, as are a few memory sticks. Granted, we don't go backpacking or trekking (we take road trips staying in hotels, or self catering cottages for a week or two) so we can carry more kit.

When the purpose of a holiday is photography, as it is for us, it'd be crazy not to have at least a couple of backups. Just keeping stuff on memory cards certainly wasn't an option on my last trip - we had 450+MB of stills and 130MB of video :nuts:
 
I'd also look at a few big pen drives/zip drives, these have come right down in price, saw a 64gb one for around £20 the other day, cheap extra back-up and you could keep them on your person.
 
sarahhj said:
Barry, I guess it depends on how light you need to travel, where you are going and what the purpose is - everyone is different.
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Agree, When I go on holiday, everything has to fit in one rucksack inc the tent. So weight is very important to me.
 
Thank for all the comment all taken on board.

Trying to keep the weight down to allow me to take more camera gear, I’m wondering how many shoots I will be taking in total and think I might be a bit worried about running out of cards no matter how many I take, so as I said in an earlier post thinking of the Netbook option with a back up hard drive and maybe some memory sticks.

Will be doing a self drive tour for 12 days so all me gear if not with me in the overnight accommodation it will be in the back of the 4x4.

On another note is there a battery charger around to charge camera batteries (5D Mk 2) that you can plug into a cigarette lighter?

Trevor
 
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