Luckily we never got mugged or lost any luggage! But we've all heard the horror stories of people loosing their camera equipment and a holidays worth of pictures.
To avoid this we had our files on multiple locations:
- SD cards: We didn't delete the pics from the cards after importing them. Just make sure you have enough memory cards with you. Also check the speed. I used some of my older slower ones. They slowed down the camera to a terrible crawl =/
- Laptop: Of course we imported the pics on the MacBook Air.
- Thumb drive: From the laptop I synchronised the pictures onto a big thumb drive. Try to use a tool like Synkron which only copies the files which have changed. Again check the speed! I just bought the cheapest 128GB drive I could find. Guess what, it is awfully slow =(
- iPod: Have one of these old babies laying around? Use it as backup disk! I had my old 160GB version with me, so I just checked the Sync Photos option. Don't forget to check the Include full-resolution photos as well or you end up with tiny pictures ;) If you don't have enough free space you can convert your music to a lower bit rate to free up space. Also handy on a full iPhone.
- Cloud: When I got a cheap offer for 1TB cloud storage from Bitcasa for 80USD a year I took it. Of course you need quite a fast internet connection or it will take forever. We would let it run in the background when ever we used the Air. To be honest I don't know how up to date the pictures where in the cloud. This was more of if all else fails backup, luckily it wasn't needed.
Of course copying the files over so many different locations only serves its purpose if you don't have all the drives at the same place. We travelled with the laptop and SD cards in the little bag and the thumb drive and iPod in each of our bigger bags. So if push came to shove we would have had to loose three bags to loose our precious pictures.
