In 2006 I burned two months worth of photos to disc in a photo lab in Bangkok. It was a modern shop with technology that probably outstrips what I would have found at most places in North America. When I returned home, I put the discs in a safe place and downloaded all the images from memory cards to computer. I resized the better images to share online or print out, and largely forgot about them.

A year later, someone thought it would be a good idea to kick down my apartment door and steal my computer. So many of my photos and writings from the last few years were gone, and I was left with a pile of backup discs in varying conditions. Little of my writing survived, and only one of the two discs from my months in Thailand was readable by my new computer. I tried it on my computer at work, I tried it on my brother’s professional photo editing system, I even sent it home with a few friends to see if they could rescue the data, but the disc remained unreadable. While I’m sure I could have paid a data recovery expert to try to pull the photos off for me, I was so frustrated that I decided to just leave it.

These days I shoot a 12.3 megapixel digital SLR (as opposed to the 2 MP point and shoot I had in Thailand) and I’ve learned that my backup solutions needed to scale with the upgrade. If you’re creating anything of value on your computer, what steps are you taking to ensure that you don’t lose it for good if everything goes down?

The Rule of Three
Always keep your important items in 3 different locations. This is as important as your documents are to you. It’s highly recommended that at least one of the backup locations is not in the same room or building as the other two. Do you live in an apartment or condo with a sprinkler system? Ever looked around at your electronics and realized how much would disappear if the apartment down the hall was on fire and your sprinklers went off?

Backing Up Your Writing
The nice thing about backing up text documents is the relatively small amount of space they take up.

• Site 1: Your Hard Drive. Easy, this is where your work already lives.
• Site 2: An External Drive. 4 GB thumb drives are incredibly cheap these days, but to store thousands of pages of text documents, you only need 1 GB. For larger backup solutions, I love my WD My Passport Essential 500 GB drive so much that I took it to South America for 5 weeks to back up my photos. Use the built in software on your computer (I use Time Machine on my Mac), incremental back up software (I use Carbon Copy Cloner), or just drag and copy files from one drive to the next.
• Site 3: On the Interwebs. This is the second easiest method. Check out the online backup tools like Dropbox, Mozy, or something you’ve had recommended. After about ten minutes of set up and initial sync, I had all of my writing stored in the Dropbox folder on my hard drive. Everything placed in this folder is mirrored on the Dropbox website, and accessible through a login. I also have Dropbox installed on my netbook, and it automatically updates to the latest versions of my writing when it’s able to connect to the Dropbox server. With the 2 GB of storage on a free account, my writing is safe in the event of a physical calamity, easy to access if I’m not at my own computer, and synced across multiple computers as long as I have internet access. What’s not to like?

• Alternative to Online Storage. Okay, it’s 2010, but not everyone has daily internet access. What else can you do? Buy a second flash drive and leave it at the office. Bring it home once a week to do a backup, and return it to your office the next day. Don’t work in an office? Swap with a friend every week. You store their weekly backup, and they store yours. No friends? Put your drive in a plastic bag or watertight container and bury it in the woods. Dig it up every week to copy your data, and while you’re digging maybe think about, you know, getting out and meeting people.

Backing Up Your Photos While Travelling
This is what I did on my last trip. You’ll see that it still carries the risk of having all the data in the same area, but with internet connections being slow, and online storage beyond a few GB getting expensive, this was a risk I wasn’t too worried about.

• Site 1: Your Memory Cards. I don’t erase memory cards until I’m desperate for space.
• Site 2: A Computer Hard Drive. Most nights in Chile and Peru (until my netbook’s hard drive died), I used Lightroom to import the day’s images and give them a rough sort. Lightroom stores the photos in a Year/Month/Day folder tree, and the computer lives in my main backpack. It often stayed in the room while I was out all day. After the netbook went belly up, I used hotel computers to transfer to Site 3.
• Site 3: An External Drive. If you’re shooting a dSLR, you have no reason not to go buy at least a 500 GB drive. My WD drive is small enough that I regularly copied my Lightroom folders to the external drive with incremental backup software, and then carried the external drive in my camera bag while out for the day.

Backing up your work may seem like an extra expense or effort, but if you’re one of those people who only has one copy of your key works, how would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and it had disappeared?

I worked at an outdoor shop in Squamish when I first moved to British Columbia. Squamish is a popular climbing destination, and carries the not unusual stigma of being a town where you run a high risk of having your car broken into at the parking lots outside of town. Every now and then someone would be walking around the store making a list of items and their costs to report to their insurance company. Chatting about the theft and bad luck, it came out on two separate occasions that students on a summer road trip had lost the computer with the single digital copy of their entire grad thesis. Sure, they had various printouts and notes that they could piece back together, but the bulk of the writing was gone forever.

How many hours have you put into your manuscript, and how prepared would you be if your computer just didn’t turn on one day?

PS: If you would like an extra 250 MB of space on a free 2 GB Dropbox account, please use this Dropbox referral link.

As has become a bit of a custom, and because people have been asking, here’s what I’m packing while in Costa Rica for 2 and a half months.

Bag one is an Arc’teryx Cierzo 35 L daypack. The bag is fairly light, expands to hold a fair bit, and still compresses down when only partially full. The shoulder and waist straps are fairly minimal, but since I don’t ever plan on having the bag full to bursting, or carrying it long distances with full loads, I’m not overly concerned about that. At any given time, the pack is typically 2/3 full. I’ve already had a few people I’ve met down here give me incredulous looks and ask if this was everything I had with me, and the best answer I have is that you don’t realize what you don’t need until you try leaving it behind. I rarely miss the things I’ve left at home, and on the rare occasion I think I need something else, I buy it on the road.

Bag two is a DaKine 6’5″ surfboard bag. Although my pack is never quite full, I do have a full sized towel that lives in the board bag during transit. I also have a hooded sweatshirt that I wore when I left and on the plane, and since it’s a bit bulky, I’ve been stashing it in the board bag as well.

Electronics
10.1″ Acer Aspire One D250
First Gen iPod Nano
Canon G7
Miscellaneous cables and headphones

Clothing (packed and worn)
3 pairs of board shorts
1 pair Blurr Jive shorts
Patagonia Roving Pants
3 cotton t-shirts
1 Patagonia button up long sleeve shirt
1 pair Patagonia boxer shorts*
Patagonia Boaris shoes
Reef Sandals
2 pair socks

Toiletries
Toothbrush, Kiss My Face toothpase (full size)
Small assortment of bandages
Ibuprofen
OnSight Clear Window bag

Miscellaneous
Moleskine Notebook, pocket Notebook & Fisher Space Pen
Passport/Wallet/Documents
Stack of novels
Petzl Tikka headlamp
Earplugs, Sleep mask,
Stainless steel water bottle
Pocket knife with corkscrew

Surf
Bessel 6’3″ surfboard with DaKine leash
O’Neil rashguard
Wax, scraper, fin key

* note that I only wear the boxers with my pants, which I haven’t put on since I got off the plane. I also almost never wear shoes, so am not wearing the socks often either.

Several people have asked how the Gorillapod worked out on my recent trip to Chile and Peru, and my answer is that it performed great… in exactly the way I expected it to.

I shoot a Nikon D300. The metal chassis on this camera means that it’s a bit on the heavy side. Add to that a Nikon 18-200mm zoom lens, and you’re working with a bit of a bulky package. Under this amount of strain, the Gorillapod (GP) will actually collapse on itself. As you can see in the photo, I started wrapping the GP around my camera bag in order to secure it. The GP is less a tripod in this scenario, than it is a means to attach my Manfrotto 486RC2 compact ball head to a stable surface.

Why not just use a sandbag or sweater? Precision. I’m not a tripod shooter, and knew that I only wanted the GP for low-light and night sky situations, but even in these situations, I wanted to be able to easily point my camera where I wanted it to face. I’ve had moderate success propping the camera up with a jacket in the past, but the GP and camera bag (or rock, or other rounded surface) allowed me to swing my camera in many different directions without rejigging the prop. While not perfectly stable, and being susceptible to shifting with the 18-200mm racked all the way out, it gave my just enough precision and stability to get the shots I wanted. The added weight in my bag was negligible when compared to the benefits of the Gorillapod, and the GP did spend most of its time in my backpack, rather than in my camera bag.

If you need great stability and don’t care for finessing your setup, you should likely bring a full tripod. If you’re not too concerned about taking longer exposures and think you’ll be able to manage by propping on your bag or spare sweater, then skip the Gorillapod.

Interesting to note: A Gorillapod with ball head looks like a grenade to some security X-Ray techs. They ran my pack back and forth several times and were becoming rather agitated until I told them I had some weird stuff in there. The woman who opened my bag in Vancouver kept saying “it looks like something very serious for us” before admitting quietly that it resembled a grenade.

Update: I did not go with the original setup described before my trip to South America. I became frustrated during my final packing and made some changes late in the evening on the night before I left. What follows is the amended version.

One of the biggest things a traveller worries about is their pack. A common question on the travel forums is “Which pack should I buy?” and with good reason. Sometimes it seems that there are so many options to choose from and no easy way to decide what is best for you. It helps to see what others are using, so keep reading to see what I’m currently packing when I hit the road for more than a couple of weeks.

The pack itself is a 45L F-Stop Tilopa. Designed as a camera pack with adventure sports photographers in mind, it translates very well to a travel pack once the large ICU is swapped out for a smaller one. Camera gear stays safe, leaving plenty room for the rest of my travel gear. Some may get nervous at the thought of having roughly 25L of space left once the camera gear is dealt with, but with a bit of planning, everything you need for a month away will fit just fine. After a few longer trips now, I’ve learned what I can and can not get away with in various climates. The small ICU is an odd enough size compared to the bag, that it just isn’t an efficient use of space, and makes it very difficult to pack clothes and other necessities inside the bag. Without the ICU, I could easily afford to just toss my warmer and bulkier clothing in and out of this pack without having to carefully arrange every last bit. My strobe and GorillaPod spent most of their time in this main pack.

Along with the Tilopa, I will be using an F-Stop Mala. A more traditional top-loading camera bag, this allows me quick access to all my gear when I need it. With a bit of extra high-density foam along the bottom of the main compartment, I was able to store my chargers and cables while still allowing the D300 and 18-300mm to sit flush with the top of the bag. A pair of light gloves, a guidebook, notebook, pens, random tickets and papers, and other junk can be stashed in the clear top pocket or larger front pocket.

Post Trip Update: What did I learn?
While I’m immensely happy with my other clothing and gear choices, I would not go with this bag setup again. Part of this has to do with my frustration at the Tilopa zipper and how the weatherproof zipper covers stretched and caused the top zipper to stick and become nearly impossibly to close without a struggle. It also didn’t help that the bag just wasn’t that comfortable when loaded. The back panel seemed to buckle in a way that I’ve never experienced before. The main benefit of the bag was its compact design and the large opening of the back panel.

The Tilopa worked quite well for what it should do, but I personally do not want to ever again carry a shoulder bag everywhere I go for 5 weeks. I was not staying in the most expensive and secure of guest houses at all times and–having had a pack stolen in the past–rarely felt safe leaving all my camera gear in the room. This meant hauling the heavy bag everywhere. The hip belt does a lot to reduce the strain on your shoulder, but at the end of the day, it’s just not the most comfortable option. It also becomes difficult to carry a water bottle and jacket without adding yet another pack to the setup.

What would I do next time?
My next plan is to find a camera specific backpack and a medium-small duffel bag. I want three things of my camera bag: quick access to camera, comfort when carrying all day long, and enough extra space to fit extra items. Every time I had to travel with both bags, I found myself carrying my clothing on my back and my camera on my shoulder. I’d rather have a light, rugged, easy to open duffel bag over my shoulder, and my camera on my back.

The details of What’s In The Bag:

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Once upon a time, there existed a National Aeronautics and Space Administration who desired a pen that could perform in the vacuum of space. More than a billion dollars later, Paul C. Fisher developed the SPACE® PEN. What did the Russians do?

They used a pencil.

While the preceding anecdote may fall short of the truth, it does little to detract from how great the Fisher Bullet SPACE® PEN is for the modern traveller. When capped, this 95 mm long pen slips easily into a pocket. Remove the cap, slide it onto the back, and you have a 133 mm writing tool that sits comfortably in your hand. This alone would be enough for me to carry one of these around on a regular basis, but it’s the technology that ultimately sold me on it.

The cartridges of conventional ball point pens are open to permit ink to be fed to the point. The secret behind the Fisher Space Pen lies in the unique design characteristics of the ink and the high manufacturing tolerances of the ball point and socket. The ink is fed to the ball point by gas pressure permitting the pen to write in any position.

That means the SPACE® PEN won’t lose pressure when you’re lying in a hammock and writing with your notebook propped up against your bent knees. It also gives reliable performance in extreme heat and cold, and when combined with something like a Rite In The Rain® notebook, works just fine in wet conditions. The weight and balance do take some getting used to, but once you adjust to the feel of the pen, the ink flows smooth and consistent every time.

While a touch expensive in the $25-30 range, Fisher offers $7 refill cartridges in a variety of points and ink colours. If you’re not one of those people who seem to be constantly losing things, the Bullet SPACE® PEN is a worth addition to any traveller’s pocket or bag.