Best way to store files for long trip?

Going on a two week vacation. Have two 16gb cards, but should fill those up very quickly. What is the normal way to store files? At the end of each day, delete the bads and put on an external HD? Burn on a DVD? Have a MBP with about 80 GB's of free storage. Should I just hope that is enough?

I use a Hyperdrive external harddrive, 500GB. Excellent system.

You can get any size storage you want, you can even buy the empty case and install your own laptop harddrive to save a few bucks.

If you are traveling with your laptop, you can upload every day to the hard drive or to an external. I do that with a Passport EHD. It's reliable. Sometimes, if there is internet access, I upload to my smugmug gallery, the keepers only. That way others can track my vacation and I can make sure something is never lost. The Hyperdrive is nice. If you go that way, make sure you copy onto a DVD or CD later or else you'll run out of room.

Remember not to make the mistake of only backing up on one medium.

Always have your pictures in two places at the end of the day. You can either buy more cards to cover what you'll need during this trip, keeping your pictures on your cards and backing-up to your MBP. Or purchase something like a Hyperdrive and backup to both it and your MBP. Then you can reformat your cards and continue shooting on your trip.

When I'm traveling, I keep my pictures on my CF cards and backup to my laptop. I reformat the cards only after I've returned home and have imported the pictures into Lightroom with a backup copy on an external drive. I don't do a lot of "field editing", so I end up with several throwaway shots when i get back home.

Chris

I just dont have the money to buy more cards for a one time use thing.

NothingRemains10 wrote in post #10515891
I just dont have the money to buy more cards for a one time use thing.

1: You don't have to use this solution.
2: Ah, but you do have the money for a 100-400?
3: No need to justify anything to us. You are the one caring about your pictures.

Edit: Hehe, just noticed your nick and how fitting it is for exactly this thread (:

How about just shooting less? Do you really need to take 1,000 photos every day?

On my last trip, at the end of each day when we returned to the hotel, I'd download the cards to our laptop then burn a DVD of the photos before formatting the cards for use the next day.

I agree with others here - I want the photos on more than one medium, thus the laptop hard drive and the DVD. Plus, by having a physical DVD copy, somehow I feel safer than both copies being on two different hard drives. And to even be more anal, the laptop and DVDs went home in separate carry on bags split between me and my wife.

NothingRemains10 wrote in post #10515291
Going on a two week vacation. Have two 16gb cards, but should fill those up very quickly. What is the normal way to store files? At the end of each day, delete the bads and put on an external HD? Burn on a DVD? Have a MBP with about 80 GB's of free storage. Should I just hope that is enough?

If you have an external HD you can back up the original files on it as well s your MBP. If you don't have an external HD, DVDs would be an economic way of backing up.

When I'm on a job I back up the morning session and at the end of the day on both my MBP and Iomega portable HD and hope that lightning does not strike twice


Enjoy your vacation

this is my entire flow when away from home
filled card goes into hyper drive within minutes of being taken out of the camera
card goes back in the case upside down so i know not to use it
when i get back to the hotel, camper, tent, yurt or whatever im staying in "yes ive stayed in a yurt for a job before" i import the card into a new lightroom catalog for the trip/event im at
lightroom catalog is copied to a external drive using rsync
the hyperdrive never leaves my sight and the external drive is never kept with the laptop except at night when were there
typically i will also fedex the external drive home just so all 3 copies are not traveling by the same means
yes iam ultra paranoid about data but typically im being paid for these things more then me being on vacation iam however just se to working that way so i treat every photo the same way

i cant find the article but i remember reading a story from a sporting event that i think was the winter olympics but i may be wrong about that. anyway they had a media building where all the photogs had there computers gear and what not. all of them had there stuff copied on multiple devices but that didnt matter as some point in there night the place caught fire and it burned to the ground torching all there gear and photos. a lot of them lost days worth of photography because of it so always keep your backups in different places.

Each night in Europe we:

1. emptied our cards onto the laptop.
2. burned 2 DVDs of the data.
3. each morning we mailed 1 of the DVDs back home.

Now that internal laptop Blu Ray burners are under $190, I'm sure I'll upgrade my laptop drive for the next trip. 25 Gb (or 50Gb for the DLs) per disc sure is better than 8.5 GB on a DVD-DL

dovaka: It surprises me that you don't upload to an offsite server as well

If you really want to make sure you don't lose any pictures and that your backup system is robust then you need a two drive solution. Your MBP with an external HD is fine - until the MBP dies. Then both your backup locations are unusable. Best solution is a small computer (MBP or Netbook) and a Photo Storage Device like the Hyperdrive. Then, if one of them dies you've still got the other in full working order.

Good point Frank

On my last big job, the MBP did indeed die. Or at least the graphics card did and that halted my backup process. Fortunately it was the last day of the shoot and I had backed up the morning's work. Still though, it shows that things can happen at the wrong time.


Cheers