Backup on photography trips?

[diputs]

Do you backup your photos on trips?

I am going to bring a netbook (borrowed from a friend) and a harddrive (trying to figure out the size now) to transfer all of my photos off my sd cards ever night.

With the cost of harddrives being so low, should I get a second drive so that I have (2) copies of my photos?

I am going on a 7 day trip to take photos for a photography class assignment. The photos will only be for my use, no one is paying me, but I would still hate to come back empty handed.

Any suggestions on how many gb of memory in cards and hard drives would be appreciated. I am planning on buying enough batteries to be able to fill the memory cards without having to recharge. The idea is I leave in the morning and will not come back all day. I will backup and recharge over night while I am sleeping.

[sk66]

I did on a trip to China and it saved my a$$. I downloaded to the laptop and backed up to an external drive. 500GB should be plenty large for almost any situation.
If the netbook has very limited drive space, then maybe 2 drives. There's also online storage as a backup option, and they back their storage up.

[prrs4me]

We just returned from a 4 week driving trip across the US. I brought my laptop and a 320 external drive. I also have cards totaling about 30 gigs. I backed up every night but did not format the cards. I shoot in RAW and figured I would format only if I ran out of card space. I had 2 cameras and a p&s with me. I just made it with the card space so I really had 2 backups. For 7 days you probably won't need that much. But the more space the better.

[Jill H]

For a recent five week camping/driving trip we did, I took a lap top and a 250gb external hard drive and downloaded to the laptop and external drive every night. I also took a stack of cds and saved to them as well as added insurance.

As we were camping we were lucky to have a power convertor in the car so I could charge batteries and the lap top while on the road.

I didn't reformat any cards till I had to reuse them. Please be doubly sure before you re-format that you have downloaded the photos on the card first. I unfortunately lost one set of photos like this - I was swapping cards over in the camera, I had two cards in my hands, thought I had swapped them over, but then accidentally put the same card back in the camera, and formatted it without re-checking what was on it first.

[mipo]

The advantage of also having an external HD is their size.
I mean the USB powered external HD are small enough to be sotred in the hotel room safe ot the hotel safe at the counter.
This way your second copy is safe against theft.

Also on the netbook a image software can be used to do a daily review of the pictures.
I use Irfanview with the plugins (it is a freeware).

[lyztrigil]

Glad to hear you're using this: I plan to keep it much more aggressively up-to-date than has been the case in the past, but don't hesitate to let me know if you find errors or need clarifications.