Storage and Backup

"I didn't really care about the camera - that can easily be replaced," explained Jutta, "it was the pictures in the camera that I cared about." I have a lot of respect for Jutta - she is quite a lady. At 60 years old she rode her bicycle, by herself, from Venezuela to the Yucatan where we met up with her. While she was in an internet cafe in South America someone stole her cheap little point-and-shoot camera from her bike.

In and of itself that was nothing, it could easily be replaced. But stored on the memory card in the camera were ALL the pictures she took while pedaling through Venezuela. Irreplaceable memories gone forever. There is a simple moral to this story - backup everything that can't be easily replaced and do it as often as practical. It's as simple as that.

How to back up your memories is not so simple. There are many strategies to use and there is no single best way. It depends on how many and what kind of memories you have (photos or videos), what type of internet speed you anticipate, whether you have a laptop, your level of technical ability, how much time & money you are willing to part with, how long you are traveling for, and what quality pictures or video you are taking (low, medium, or high resolution). It's a game of trying to balance cost, weight, hassle and reliability. I've been on the road for a year and have changed my strategy several times, so I shall pass on my experiences and what I've learned from them:

Strategy #1:

Use an established website that allows you to store pictures on their site.

Although I've heard of people backing up their photos this way, I've never used this strategy. There are many websites you can use to store your photos on including Crazy Guy On A Bike, Flickr, PictureTrail, and ElephantDrive. Do a Google search and I'm sure you will find a bunch more.

• Once you upload the photos you don't have to worry about them again, they are safe
• You can easily share them with others
• It's simple and you don't have to carry any extra gear

• Read the fine print. Many sites will compress your pictures to save space on their servers. This degrades the photo quality greatly. I once met a traveler who was using a free website to store her pictures and I asked her if they compressed the photos. She had no idea. Later, she looked it up and found that they did. Consequently all her photos lost a significant amount of quality. She was pissed!!!
• Read the fine print. The site will lead you to believe that they'll store your photos for free, but later you will find out that after you store a certain number of photos they start charging. Their assumption is that you won't want to change to another picture storage site and you'll pay the extra cost.
• It could take a long time to upload your photos and especially if you don't have your own laptop (since you won't be able to take advantage of all the free wireless sites and will be forced to use internet cafes) the costs can really add up. The lower the resolution of your pictures, the faster they will upload.

Strategy #2:

It entails burning all your photos onto DVD's, carrying them with you, then periodically sending them to someone back home for safe keeping.

What I do is backup the photos to a DVD every two weeks or so, each time throwing the backup from four weeks ago away (so I have two backups). Then every couple of months I send the DVD's home.

• It's simple and cheap. The availability and cost of DVD's is very reasonable. Even in small towns in Central America I could find them for sale in an internet cafe.
• Unless you are taking lots of high resolution photos on an extended trip (over 6 months) you can probably fit your entire photo backup on one DVD.

• You have to have access to a DVD burner which is most likely on your laptop. That means, you have to carry a laptop.
• Weight. Even though each DVD is very light, they accumulate and add up in terms of weight. Unless you send them home after each backup they will start accumulating.
• Reliability. DVD's should not be used to store your backup. They go bad especially if they are getting banged around in a backpack or are subjected to temperature extremes. After I send a DVD to my sister, I have her transfer them to a large hard disk drive I bought her.
• Hassle, cost, and risk of mailing them home. Especially in third world countries where you don't speak the language it's hard to package the DVD's, find a post office, and mail them home. It also costs money. On top of that you are taking your chances that they won't get damaged or worse - they just won't make it to where you send them. I never delete the pictures from my laptop until my sister confirms they are safely backed up on a hard disk drive.
• It takes two people for this strategy - you and the person you are sending them to. The person you send them to needs to transfer them to a more reliable medium.

Strategy #3:

This is very similar to strategy #1 except you use a web hosting site and upload the pictures differently.

Bascially, all you need to do is get your own site (and domain name) and put your photos on it. You can develop the site for the public, or simply use it for backup. We have a hidden part of our website where we backup our photos along with the public part where we display the web pages. This is my primary method of backup.

You must be a LITTLE technically saavy to use this method since you have to know how to connect to your website. If your web hosting server uses Windows you can use the drop and drag method to upload. If it uses the Linux operating system you must use FTP - neither way is particularly hard. I use a Linux-based server and an FTP program to upload my pictures. If you need an FTP program and don't have your own laptop that's not a problem - use Filezilla on a flash drive as explained here.

• Once you upload the photos you don't have to worry about them again, they are safe
• It's simple and you don't have to carry any extra gear
• You have total control of how the pictures are uploaded and saved, and you can save them in any format you want.
• Web hosting sites are cheap. We're getting a 300GB site and pay $7.50 a month. This is expensive since I wanted some other services they offered. I believe you can get a very basic 100 GB site for under $4 per month.

• It could take a long time to upload your photos and, if you are using an internet cafe, the costs add up quickly. If you have your own laptop you can find free WiFi in a lot of places. I spent a half day in the Pizza Hut in Choluteca, Honduras and uploaded over a hundred high resolution pictures. Of course the lower the resolution of your pictures, the faster they will upload. Low resolution (1600x1200) photos upload much, much faster than high resolution (2592x1944) photos.
• You have to have a certain level of technical expertise in order to get a website set up in the first place.

Strategy #4:

In this strategy you will use memory cards to store your photos on.

There are two main types of memory cards in use now: SDHC and CF memory cards which can store up to a whopping 32 GB - enough to store hundreds, if not thousands, of high resolution photos. These cards are also small and lightweight enough to be mailed in an envelope. Certain cameras, including most Sony cameras, have their own specific memroy cards.

• These cards are so small and lightweight they can be mailed home in an envelope or stored in your gear
• If you have a SDHC or CF compatable camera (more and more are going this way) you don't even need a laptop
• The chips are very durable, much more so than a DVD
• Back up is fast and you won't be spending a lot of time doing it

• Cost. They are expensive
• Somehow have to get the photos onto the memory card. If your camera is SDHC or CF compatible, this isn't a problem. If not, you'll have to have a SDHC or CF compatible slot on your laptop. My camera is not compatible so I use the USB slot to load the photos onto my laptop where I sort and throw away the bad photos, then load the good ones onto a SDHC memory card through the SDHC slot in my computer. As another alternative check out this flash memory card with card reader.

Strategy #5:

In this method you will transfer your photos to an external hard disk drive probably connected to a computer through the USB slot.

The hard disk drive could be a dedicated hdd or something like an MP3 player. Some people take backup so seriously they bring two hdd's and have backup in two different places.

• This is the simplest and fastest way to do backup
• External hard disk drives have lots of room on them and you can essentially store as many pictures as you want

• Cost. Hard disk drives are expensive
• Hard disk drives have movable parts and are prone to breakage. Put all of your pictures on a hdd and it breaks (or gets stolen) you're up a river without a paddle.
• They are hard to send home because of their size and weight.
• You still have to transfer your photos from your camera to the hdd which means having USB access on a computer. As I mentioned, during my travels in Mexico and Central America, this is not a problem. In the United States and Canada it was a much greater problem.

Other Thoughts

• There is a well-known saying in Geekdom about any data: it doesn’t exist unless it exists in at least two places. It wouldn't hurt to adapt two of the strategies or use one of them twice.
• Video. Strategies #2, #4, or #5 would be appropriate for video. I am taking and backing up video. I don't save a lot of it because I go through all the clips and delete at least half of them before I back them up. I am also careful when I take video that I keep the clips short and not take extraneous footage. This saves lots of memory space. My sister doesn't have SDHD capacity so I'm using DVD's, otherwise I'd go that way since my video camera is SDHC compatible.