Comments on: Backing up digital photos in the field

Ultimately, it's a matter of playing the odds of hardware failure while keeping in mind all the dumb things that we can do to sabotage ourselves.

[TomTester]

My vacation trick: I use 2 large flash cards, one marked odd days, the other even days, and swap them every night (leave the other one in the hotel safe). If one crashes I'll always have a representative set of pictures for that vacation. On longer trips I'd take more and Fedex full cards to my office.

[gjl229]

I'm even more paranoid.

I copy holiday photos to my laptop nearly every day, and immediately upload all but the losers to Flickr afterward as we've always had Internet access. I lose quality by uploading there but still have photos. Then, every 2-3 days, I burn the laptop copies to CD/DVDs which I keep in a separate place. On our return, the disks are in checked luggage and my laptop comes aboard.

I also thought of mailing the disks back or leaving a set behind with a trustworthy person. That seemed a bit pathological so I settled for only three methods.

Without regular access, I'd probably look at shooting only JPEGs and watch for a sale on big flash drives. I'm also looking for some smaller and cheap device I could use to xfer images from the card directly to the flash drive, leaving the laptop behind.

[jeff Lake]

When you don't have a laptop with you,stop at a local WalMart.Their Photo department will make a Disc from your card in about 10 minutes and they only charge $2.50.Good deal for solid backup.

[SharpCrimper]

On a 3-week trip to Peru, I carried a Digital Foci Photo Safe to copy my media each day. I was shooting HD video and stills and the five 4G SD cards I had wasn't going to cut it and I couldn't really estimate how much I would use overall. Since I was hiking and backpacking around, a laptop wasn't a good option and the photo safe is battery powered and worked like a champ.

[ghaff]

There's a fair variety of portable hard disks that can read memory cards out there. Both prices and features differ considerably. I don't have one myself but I've seen examples in use and they seem to work pretty well. A lot more practical than a laptop IMO--though obviously one may carry a laptop for other reasons.

[SURFNAKEDHAWAII]

I needed something compact and easy to use for storing digital photos and flash hd video out at Burning Man where extreme weather, dust and lack of electricity made laptops and disc burners a bit impractical, so i've been using my 160gb ipod enabled for disk use with a usb adapter that i can plug my usb thumb flash card reader right into and transfer right to the ipod. The nice thing about this method is you can view all the photos and video on the ipod to insure successful transfers. 16gb high quality compact flash cards and a solidus solar charger for the ipod and cameras have made shooting and storing away from civilization quick and easy.

[DrtyDogg]

I just pop my memory card into my phone and ftp them to my home server. Quick and easy :-)

[ballmerisanape]

Belkin makes a great multi-card reader for the last gen iPods. Just stick the memory card in the reader and connect it to the iPod.. everything gets backed up over firewire to the iPod.

[ghaff]

I've seen the Belkin device. It seems to have a lot of negative reviews/comments online. I'm also curious why this seems to be the only example of its kind. Agree in general that backup to a disk-based media player would make a lot of sense.