Back up photos while on the road

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kxl

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I used to travel with a laptop and and external drive. If I had internet access, I would upload photos to the cloud; otherwise, I backed them up to the external drive. I'd prefer not to travel with my laptop. I will likely bring my iPad Pro.

I've also used the Sanho drive in the past - plug in an SD card, press a button and the images get backed up. I've checked out the WD Wireless Passport Pro. This might be a possibility.

Obviously I can buy a few more SD cards. I will be suing my Fuji XT-2, shooting both jpg and RAW.

How do you back up your photos while on the road for 3-4 weeks, and for the sake of argument, let's say you won't have access to the internet for the duration?
 
For a couple of years I had a portable back-up device, Panasonic?? (similar to the "Sanho drive" you describe) that accepted CF and SD cards... the problem was that the battery eventually died and "uniquely sized" replacement was way too expensive. I still think it's a good solution, but I would look for one with generic or multiple sourced batteries. As well I would not reuse the memory card so as to have two copies.

Still shooting a lot of film so there's that, and not professionally so...
 
Portable storage are really small these days. You can even purchase 512GB USB-sticks. That said I was happy my phone was backed up in the cloud when it broke. The future is cloud storage but I don't think it's the most practical solution today when traveling.

I'd you don't have an iPhone you can transfer data through practically any Android device with tiny SD-Micro USB adapters
 
kxl said:
I used to travel with a laptop and and external drive. If I had internet access, I would upload photos to the cloud; otherwise, I backed them up to the external drive. I'd prefer not to travel with my laptop. I will likely bring my iPad Pro.

I've also used the Sanho drive in the past - plug in an SD card, press a button and the images get backed up. I've checked out the WD Wireless Passport Pro. This might be a possibility.

Obviously I can buy a few more SD cards. I will be suing my Fuji XT-2, shooting both jpg and RAW.

How do you back up your photos while on the road for 3-4 weeks, and for the sake of argument, let's say you won't have access to the internet for the duration?
Click to expand...

I don't.

I was just on the road for six weeks and made a couple thousand photos with my Leica CL and another thousand or so with iPad Pro and iPhone 8 Plus. They were all fine just sitting there in the various device's storage.

I've never lost a digital capture on the road anyway, all my cards and cameras over the past twenty years since I started working with digital capture have been 100% reliable. When I was out shooting on paid jobs for extended times, I'd often make backups before getting home, but that was just a matter of business practice, not necessity.

The requirement of backup for your travel shooting is one of those silly myths that's come down from when digital capture was new and film users didn't trust the new technology, it wasn't what they were used to. In those days, cameras weren't necessarily quite as reliable and cards did occasionally fail.

That was a long time ago. No quality cards or cameras made in the last decade are so unreliable, in fact I'd wager I lost far more film exposures to mishap and circumstance in my film only years travel than I've ever lost with digital capture.

Just go take photos and handle your cards carefully when you take them out of the camera. Whatever you roll over from camera into iPad Pro for quick look and processing is automatically double protected, of course. (And of course, if doing photography is your reason for buying an iPad Pro, buy the one with the largest storage capacity so it has plenty of space to work with. Mine is 256G capacity, if I were buying today I'd buy 512G. It's worth it.)

The iPad Pro has become my most used computer, and the only computer I carry when traveling. It does a terrific job for that.

G
 
Peter Wijninga said:
A caveat...SD Cards...in some countries many of them are fake. Better buy them from a trusted source before you hit the road.
Click to expand...

This goes along with the other great rule of travel photography: Never travel with untested equipment. :D

I would never buy SD cards or cameras while actually traveling unless a failure forced me to do so. That's only happened once in forty plus years of travel, and that was before digital photography existed.

G
 
Usually, I have my laptop. I bought a 2 TB USB hard drive that is slightly larger than palm-sized and back up to it as well as to the laptop hard drive. I keep the camea media after the trip as well.
 
WD do a HD with a built in SD reader, the latest gen is said to be reasonably fast and you can connect via wireless to your phone to check the images are there. I would still keep the images on cards so you have 2 copies and if able use an internet cafe to upload to cloud.
 
Hi,

Two or three or four small SD cards are better than one big one. Problems with one big one can wipe out a lot of photos.

There were a lot of advantages in just having 36 pictures on a film...

Regards, David
 
Keith, we did a 1,000km trek earlier this year. I took only the X100s. Downloaded the files from the SD card to the iPad with that thing that takes the card and connects to the iPad. Sorted the files. Processed some. Did a bit of Snapseed on some. Then backed up the iPad files with this:

SanDisk 128GB iXPAND Flash Drive for iPhone / iPad
- Lightning and USB 3.0 connectors
- Auto photo backup
- Watch videos on the move
- Supports iPhone 5 and newer, iPad Air, iPad with Retina display (4th generation), iPad mini with Retina display, iPad mini and newer

It worked a treat. The whole set up was light and compact. As I wanted - had the bloody lot in my backpack!

Dan
 
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