How do you protect your images when out on the road?

[Franglais]

I was wondering how people protect their precious images when you're out on the road for a few days (example: holidays). I'm a complete paranoiac about this. Technology has evolved and there are now several possibilities. Here's what I do currently:

- I always shoot RAW and JPG. The JPG is a backup in case something happens to the RAW file (it has happened to me a couple of times)
- If I have a camera with two card slots then I put RAW on one card and JPG on the other in case one of the cards fails
- I try to have in the camera cards with enough capacity for a whole day's shooting so that I don't have to open the camera. (I have lost a load of pictures by getting the cards mixed up and formatting the wrong one)
- I always take with me a second card with half the capacity of the main one. If I do happen to fill up then I can change and carry on, knowing that I have to be careful
- In the evening I transfer all the RAW files to my portable PC in the hotel
- I do a quick check of the RAW images to make sure they are OK
- I take a backup of the PC on an external hard drive, including the RAW files
- Only when I have TWO copies of the RAW files do I format the cards in the camera for the next day

I used to use a portable disk drive to offload files at midday. I have also tried Internet tablet devices to offload pictures. But I've had too many problems with this sort of device losing my music files or corrupting a micro SD card. Right now the only thing I trust to hold the originals is a portable PC.

Anybody got any thoughts on this?

[Greg McCary]

Like you Charles I have a small Laptop. One of those ultra thin things plus an external drive. I have a backpack and keep it in there. Plus several cards to work with. I am sure with the Nikon D800 you are filling things up quickly. I am having problems at 24 mpix.
All of my final edits are uploaded to my Web Site where I have unlimited storage. I just can't upload RAW files but I am sure you could to an Icloud.
That is one downside to todays Super Cameras they eat storage quickly.
I also have one of these I use.
Corsair Flash Survivor USB flash drive - 32 GB

It has been field tested in my washing machine more than once.

[Grandpaw]

A few years back I took my laptop with me and down loaded each evening but the last two tears I haven't had a laptop to do that with. What I do know is take plenty of SD cards and as I fill one up and remove it from the camera I slide the switch on the SD card to lock it so it cannot be tampered with and I place it back in my card holder face down so that I know it is full and not available. It would be nice to have a laptop along for storage and viewing pictures in the evening but it is just not worth spending the money on a laptop just to do that.

I will say that if I start getting a few jobs, then the expense of a laptop would be warranted and I would go that route and still have enough cards to only use once until I returned home.

Most of my sales are from having photos displayed in businesses, art festivals, talking to people and showing my prints. I carry portfolio books with me just about everywhere I go so if people see me out taking pictures and we get to talking I can show them some of my work. I have made several sales just by showing my books to people while out shooting. Some day when I run out of other things to buy I probably will get another laptop,Jeff

[Franglais]

... I am sure with the Nikon D800 you are filling things up quickly. I am having problems at 24 mpix....

It's not really a problem. Card capacities have been increasing and prices have been dropping. I figure I paid about the same for my cards with each generation of cameras:

- D200 = 4GB + 2GB
- D300 = 8GB + 8GB (found a good deal in the Sales)
- D800 = 32GB + 16GB

With the D800 I can get almost 800 shots on a 32GB card but I change before it fills up because I don't want to be caught with a full card at the wrong time.

Weddings are the only event that make me do more than 1000 shots in a day. Last week, sure enough, I ran out of space on the D800 at the end of the wedding dinner - but - as I always have two cameras with me for important events I just switched over to the D300 for 450 extra shots of the dancing. (Nobody noticed the difference in the results but I could see the difference in Lightroom - the D800 outclasses the D300 in autofocus, exposure accuracy, ability to make corrections, noise, sharpness - everything in fact.. I would have done better to put the DX lens and 8GB card on the D800 and carry on at 16MPix. Must remember that.)

[Franglais]

...
Most of my sales are from having photos displayed in businesses, art festivals, talking to people and showing my prints. I carry portfolio books with me just about everywhere I go so if people see me out taking pictures and we get to talking I can show them some of my work. I have made several sales just by showing my books to people while out shooting. Some day when I run out of other things to buy I probably will get another laptop,Jeff

Well now that's an interesting idea. I'm thinking of selling photos to photo libraries (I do everything for free at the moment). I hadn't thought of business and art festivals.

Around here everybody shows their portfolio on an iPad. I must admit that it looks pretty class when you whip out the thing in a leather case and start going swoosh-swoosh through the images. You might be able to save some weight by just taking along some demonstration prints and a books and have the rest on an iPad. Do any of the others do this?

I think an iPad is an excellent device to display a copy of your work but it doesn't replace a PC as a tool while you're out shooting.

[armando_m]

My options are
1. bring my laptop and 1 external drive, only if staying overnight at a safe place
2. bring multiple cards, this is really no protection only plenty of storage

Once back home copy the raw files to another external drive and when possible make another copy that I keep in my office

I have accidentally formatted cards when I still not have copied the RAW files , I have never lost an image because of memory failure ( SD or CF cards) and I had have an external drive fail , but I had another 2 units with my files

I really think a more reliable backup would be DVDs kept in a safe place, but do I want to backup everything ? I don't know ...

yup the D800 eats up storage quickly, need to clean up my images more thoroughly and not keep trash on my disks

[Franglais]

My options are
1. bring my laptop and 1 external drive, only if staying overnight at a safe place
2. bring multiple cards, this is really no protection only plenty of storage

Once back home copy the raw files to another external drive and when possible make another copy that I keep in my office

..

OK it looks like everybody agrees on that.

I wasn't thinking about permanent storage, but the question of DVD's is a good one. I stopped using DVD's a couple of years ago when I realised that hard drives were 4 times cheaper (now it's more like 9 times cheaper). You can have multiple copies of your most precious files for a fraction of the cost (and space) of DVD's.

- I currently have a master + 4 backup disk copies of my JPG's in three different locations.
- For everything else I have a master (offline) and a backup drive in two different locations
- And yes I do keep everything

[Medley]

Fwiw, you can upload raw to Icloud. What's more, if I upload them to Aperture (iTunes too), they become part of my photostream, and don't count against the storage. But if you do that, I don't think they're actually "stored" on the cloud- They're stored in the Aperture library on the laptop, and shared.

But, I pay $100/year for an extra 50gb of storage (55gb total), so I COULD upload a card to the cloud. Normally though, I do it on an image by image basis.

[Franglais]

Fwiw, you can upload raw to Icloud. What's more, if I upload them to Aperture (iTunes too), they become part of my photostream, and don't count against the storage. But if you do that, I don't think they're actually "stored" on the cloud- They're stored in the Aperture library on the laptop, and shared.

But, I pay $100/year for an extra 50gb of storage (55gb total), so I COULD upload a card to the cloud. Normally though, I do it on an image by image basis.

I wonder how long it would take to upload a 32GB card to Internet from a hotel somewhere out in the sticks via a DSL line that is shared with other hotel guests. Usually the line speed for DSL upload to a host is much slower than download to your PC.

Cloud computing is coming. It's a good solution for (non-confidential) documents that you need to access from multiple devices but I think it will be several years before it's workable when you're producing large volumes of data each day. Thanks for the suggestion anyway.

[Medley]

yeah, not the best solution i agree. But in a pinch, it is a possibility.