Backing Up Photos on Long Trips

[memostothefuture]

an iPad won't help OP much since the storage capacity is so small and the IOS makes file management rather difficult.

my suggestion: get a lacie rugged or western digital external hard drive. wd makes a version that's small, requires no power outled and has 2tb. every apple store has it, as well as the lacie rugged drives, which are a bit more expensive. throw that sucker into your bag. carry a bunch of 16GB or 32GB CF cards with you. you will run into someone every other week who will let you borrow their laptop for an hour, right? so connect the card reader you are carrying anyway, connect the USB port on the hard drive and download whatever images you can before you lose access to the laptop. done. you will never run out of space.

however: you lose the ability to edit images on the fly. unless you are really opposed to carrying a laptop, I'd throw in a mac book air with aperture or lightroom as well as the external drive. (airs have small hdd's.)

and then travel knowing that there are always more hdd's to be had anywhere you go.

[neuroanatomist]

my suggestion: get a lacie rugged

I've got several of the LaCie Rugged drives (some older FW800/FW/400/USB2 and some newer FW800/USB3/USB2 versions). I like the bus-powered drives and they're tough enough to throw in a bag and not worry about. I use some for routine clone backups, and some for archival storage of images, etc., and I have the colored bumpers to distinguish uses.

Having said that, on trips I often bring a MacBook Air, and rather than an external HDD, I bring plenty of CF cards and a handful of 64 GB USB flash drives. That way, I can have two backup copies of all images (one on the CF card, one on a flash drive), and they're small enough to have a set on my person/bag (as opposed to having all my images in my hotel room or luggage, where they can be stolen - to me, it doesn't make sense to have a copy on the computer and a copy on the HDD, and have them stored together).