Traveling With an M9....

If my journey is longer than 2-3 days I always have my MBP with LR on it and an external firewire HD. I try daily to upload from the cards of my x1 to the computer and in the same time (LR3 makes it easy when importing) to the external HD. So I have at least two copies. Only than I reformat the cards in camera. When back home I transfer to the main computer (and again an external HD backup).
robert
 
I will have my Ipad2 with me, but no other computer.
If I do not find a simple solution for back-up, I just take with me more cards.
 
Honestly I don't really sweat it, particularly on vacation (business is quite another thing!). My wife has her happy snap point and shoot, I have my iPhone, as well as whatever 'serious' camera I happen to bring along, so I think we got it covered. I'm sure there are many shots that I missed by not taking the photo, not being there at the right moment, not stopping the car and turning around etc etc etc. At a certain point I need to let things slide and enjoy the trip, and not worry about having to find WiFi to upload my stuff to the cloud, lug all this extra stuff to backup everything each night, etc. Think I'd rather sit by the pool with my wife, have a drink, and turn that part of my life off. Particularly since I do this every day as a profession, it's nice to get away from it every so often.

Interestingly, I'm pretty well done going through my photos from the Arizona/New Mexico trip. I think I ended up shooting about 600-700 shots, and if you check my Flickr set of the trip, there are a grand total of 42 final shots that I've worked on.
 
douglasf13 said:
If you don't want to mess around with computers, you might consider something like the Digital Foci Photo Safe II series. $140 gets you a 320GB little hard drive that you can plug your SD card right into and back up. You could even get two of them, so that you can delete your SD cards as you go and still have redundancy.
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I liked the sound of that until I read a few reviews on Amazon of it. Seems like it can be rather hit or miss:

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Foci-...dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
 
I have at work 1 TB and 3 TB Western Digital Passport drives. They are too big for travel. I wonder if the 500GB drive is smaller.



JSU said:
This is pretty much what my wife and I do on our travels. We tend to end each day sharing a bottle of wine.

But I multi task with a lap top into which I have plugged a card reader and a physically small Western Digital Passport external HD (500gb), at which time I import my day's images, attaching a batch caption with location and names, etc. I have a folder of images in the computer and Photo Mechanic creates a backup folder in the external HD. I seldom actually edit all the images unless my wife asks for an image to share in emails with her friends or on FB.

An 11" Mac Book Air with a WD Pass Port external HD is pretty compact all things considered. Perhaps not the best choice for crunching hundreds of image files, but it could be a road warrior's best option for dealing with images.

I prefer Photo Mechanic, this could just as easily be done with Light Room.

I choose not to compromise quality beyond my typical standards. For me that means I use my Leicas, film or digital, home or away for my personal photos. I do not use a camera phone, never have, probably never will. Nikons are still used for most of my paying jobs.
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JSU said:
I've not seen the WD "My Passport" portable HD's in 3TB capacity, we must not be thinking of the same category HD's.

I've seen USB thumb drives as large as 64gb, 128gb versions are now available.

A couple 64gb USB thumb drives might cover your back-up needs for travel. Transfer the folders to a larger, more permanent drive when you return home.
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Your suggestion sounds very reasonable to me.
As for the WD external drives, they are called Passport, and the 3 TB is a new model.
 
Best Buy has today a 500GB external hard drive by Toshiba for $40. I just bought one online. There is no shipping fee. Target sells same drive for over $120. It weighs 5.6oz, and it has excellent reviews.
 
All the suggestions about taking computers, backup hard drive, extra SD cards etc makes me glad I don't worry about all that stuff.

I am leaving for Cambodia in a few days and taking an X100 and a few SD cards. The netbook I am taking is to surf the internet for airline reservations and skype. Won't bother uploading photos until I get back to the US.

My extra camera is an M2 and if I had to leave either the M2 or X100 at home, it would be the Fuji. I see the advantages of digital technology but it sure does not seem to have made traveling any easier then 35 mm and film. And if you are an analog dinosaur (like myself and proud of it), why would you even think about digital. Admit to have flirted with either an M9 or even a Nikon D600 over the weekend. Ended up buying some HP5 instead while saving thousands of dollars.
 
Vince Lupo said:
This is starting to sound like it's almost better to just stay home!

Cards can and do fail -- I think in the 13 years that I've been shooting digital, and using about 10 different cameras and about 50+ cards of all sizes and brands, I've had all of two fail (one CF and one SD). Even with the SD that failed, I was shooting both RAW and JPEG Fine at the time, and I was able to recover the JPEGS by putting the card in another camera and transferring the shots from that camera to my computer (and I thnk I could have recovered the RAW files if I worked hard enough on it). The CF card failed after only taking about 4 shots, so I didn't really lose much of anything. And I had been using that card for about 3 years up until that point.

Here again, I'm coming at it strictly from a vacation standpoint. One of the issues we had on our recent trip (Arizona/New Mexico) was that we were traveling in an Airstream trailer and a Chevy Suburban, so no hotel, no safe, not much security, and sometimes no amenities (no electricity and certainly no internet). So we had enough other stuff to worry about.
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So how was the Airstream living? Hope it went well as my family and I just finished an 8,500 mile trip out west with our 34' Airstream. I took a ton of photos and haven't had time yet to get to them all.

I travel for work too and bring my camera with me so I'm not afraid of the extra weight my MacBook Pro causes. I like to upload my files from my card/s every night and carry a portable backup drive to backup my laptop.

I am all about traveling light as I only shoot with a 28mm and 50mm lens kit.
 
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