Digital Backup While Traveling

[coleica]

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Hello:

Normally, while traveling, I will backup my day's worth of images to my laptop.  As a rule, no editing takes place during a trip.  I wait to get back home and transfer my images to my desktop and then the editing starts.  Is backing up to a laptop still the best option while traveling?  Are there other options available, with a smaller footprint and weight? 

Thanks in advance.

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[jaapv]

Quite a few cameras have dual card slots. I use a series of smaller cards ,each day one, in slot 2. Dump them in the Cloud every few days, whenever I have WiFi, and start again. An alternative would be my phone, I have 0.5 Tb memory in it, but FOTOS is a bit slow.

[Topsy]

When travelling I always take my Laptop as it has other uses such as web browsing and reviewing images on a larger screen so for me it makes sense to use it for back ups as well, however, not exclusively. Normally I will have several SD cards and use themin rotation for a day or couple of days  then drop the files onto my Laptop and a seperate external hard drive. I'll also as far as possible I will keep not reuse the SD cards unless I run out of space (never have yet). I tend to use smaller SD cards but have several of them and as @jaapv says when I have dual card slots (not on my M9s obviously) I will keep one with the shots on and format the other for reuse.I don't have a big Laptop (Dell Lattitude) so space and weight aren't an issue to me.

[dpitt]

I usually bring my laptop. If I keep the original SD card copy then I do not see a need for extra backup. If I want to re-use my SD card, I take a portable HDD or SSD drive with me and use that as a backup. General rule: always keep 2 copies on different physical media (or cloud) to be safe. Your laptop can break or get stolen. SD cards can fail as well, so it is not advisable to keep more than a days worth of pictures on one SD card...

If you look really hard, you can find a solution that can be operated from a phone or tablet. I had to do this for a friend who did not want to bring a laptop on the trip, and I found this:
NewQ Filehub AC750

No affiliation...

Edited April 30, 2024 by dpitt

[Stephen_C]

I always travel with my laptop and what I really appreciate is the ability to caption, keyword and otherwise process all the day's photos when I've transferred them from the camera. Before I used to take the laptop with me I seemed to spend most of my life researching apps that might allow me to:

• transfer RAW images (I don't shoot JPEGs) to an iPad;
• caption and keyword (but not otherwise process) them on the iPad; and
• transfer them to Capture One on my laptop on arrival home…with the captions and keywords intact, of course.

I never really succeeded in fully resolving the issue and travelling with the laptop has accordingly been a boon.

Stephen

[LocalHero1953]

I would like to take Jaap's solution of uploading to the cloud while travelling, but that has been impractical wherever I have travelled recently - the wifi is just too slow for uploading multiple 50mb files.

However I rarely exceed a single 128Gb SD card capacity when on holiday, and import everything to my laptop daily, so I don't have too many worries.

I can't copy or upload my exposed film either.

Edited May 1, 2024 by LocalHero1953

[Chris W]

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I take a laptop and 2 x small portable SSDs. So I back up to two separate drives, maybe one in my suitcase and one in my backpack.

[Steve Ricoh]

I don’t bother backing up whilst travelling, I simply trust the SD card. I know there’s a risk, but there’s nothing to get too excited about if the files are lost. 

[Biotar]

Android pad with SD slot and copy via OTG to SSD is small, independent and you can review images if required.

[Chuck Albertson]

On 4/30/2024 at 10:46 AM, jaapv said:

Quite a few cameras have dual card slots. I use a series of smaller cards ,each day one, in slot 2. Dump them in the Cloud every few days, whenever I have WiFi, and start again. An alternative would be my phone, I have 0.5 Tb memory in it, but FOTOS is a bit slow.

Remember, it's not "in the cloud" - it's on someone else's computer: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/09/unisuper-google-cloud-issue-account-access

[dugby]

For extended travels, I backup my SD cards to the very portable  " Sanho Colorspace UDMA 3 " multimedia storage device which supports an internal SSD, I use a 2TB Samsung 850PRO and weighs 240g. A most useful feature is the incremental backup that builds the appropriate backups over the duration of the journey without ending up with unnecessary copies of the same files.

Whilst these units are no longer marketed new, they can still be bought from the bay.

 

[SrMi]

I use iDrive to back up my photos and catalogs if I travel with good WiFi access. Without WiFi, I use small external SSD drives with Carbon Copy Cloner (Mac).