How to back up photos?

I'm not sure where to post this, but I figured this is the forum for those who are out for extended periods of time...

How do you deal with your digital photos? Although we've purchased the largest chip we can for our camera, it won't come close to holding all the photos from our upcoming 2 1/2 year journey from Alaska to Argentina. We will have a laptop with us, but won't be able to store them all on that either. We've got some flash drives, etc... but are trying to figure out how to work this all out. for those of you who are out now/have already returned home - how did you deal with your digital photos?

And i thought i took loads of photos.

An option for you seems to be to buy an external hard drive. You can get them up to 750Gb quite cheaply now.

Whether or not you get an HDD If you have a laptop with you can burn them to disk (Hard drives/flash can break at any time. You never know when. It might not happen at all, but if it does you'll be protected)
eg
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=hdd+external&x=0&y=0

You should find that enough. If not, you can always buy another hdd :-)

Get them burned on CD or DVD while you're on the road at photo places - cheap and easy. Just remember to test the discs before deleting the files on your card. You can either carry the discs with you or mail them home.

Back that up with dumping them on flickr or picasa when you find speedy and cheap high speed internet.

I have a small travel hard drive with slots for memory cards. I also had a laptop but it was better for me to have that hard drive because my computer was old and had no space for storage and I could bring the drive with me for a daytrip when I knew I'd take lots of photos (safari, gorillas etc.).

If you're taking that many photos you'll have so many CDs to be burned at cafes... I didn't find too many places outside the West burning DVDs. I'm crazy about backups so I actually burned CDs of my photos (on my own laptop) and sent them home along the way as a backup of my hard drive.

If your lap top dorsnt have much storage then you should buy a portable external drive (generally available at up to 250GB now (the 750/1000GB ) ones are full size and too heavy for a long trip. If you are looking to have a music player as well a Archos A605 is a great option with 160GB hard drive ad full music and picture capabilities. if you are travelling for such a period of time it would also be wise to burn a DVD and mail it back home now and then in case your stuff gets stolen or your hard drive fails.

Wade

Thanks everyone! We were hoping there was some kind of quick and easy, magical fix - but I guess that was a pipe dream. Since we're traveling on bikes, we are hoping to keep stuff and weight to a minimum, but we'll check into hard drives.

Hi, Why don't you use Flickr (www.flickr.com) , that's what we have done since we have started travelling and we found it brilliant.

I think of SD cards as rolls of film. You can get 2 Gig cards for peanuts these days via the internet. Buy a dozen, they're cheaper, far smaller and lighter than a portable hard drive. If you get a chance to burn to CD or DVD, take it and send the CD/DVD home as backup.

You can open several Gmail accounts at about 6 Gb each...

If your pictures are around 1Mb each, than you can store around 1000 pictures on 1 Gb. And maybe you should be more selective. Nobody likes watching slide-shows of over 1000 pictures. Bellieve me.

Ahhh... that gmail option might be a good idea!!

As for the SD cards - any suggestions on brands to look at?

Beware of using the card as a removable storage device for your trip.

ie the act of removing it from camera & reinserting it into a drive can break it. It's happened to me once (problem of the reader - i threw card away & then had the same problem when inserted 2n card & realised what was happening. After initial shock I managed to recover the pics the 2nd time)

I now take a usb lead and download to pc with that. The xd/sd stays put in the camera.

Cards & drives do break/get lost/stolen. Always back up.

We will be backing up our photos a number of ways - CD/DVD, uploading to our website, etc... It's just that taking high resolution photos takes a lot of memory, and it also takes a long time to upload them so we aren't sure how often we'll be able to back up.

I second the backup option - plus makes it super easy to share with freinds and family at the same time.

wow I am very interested in this trip. May I ask, are you going on the normal pedal-bikes or motorbikes? Sounds like a great trip to do! I am about to head off on a 10-month trip myself to Asia and Europe and was wondering the same thing to do with cameras. I will most likely use flickr and perhaps CD's if I can be bothered.