How to Save Photos during a Trip or a Round the World Tour?

If you are going on a long trip of several months, you surely have a high-performance camera on you that will take high definition photos. You will probably also use this camera or your phone to take videos. Maybe you even bring a drone to take spectacular videos.

Anyway, you will create a database of thousands of files that will represent your most beautiful memories. This base will weigh very heavy, tens, even hundreds of gigabytes.

We’ll have to think about how to save all this and avoid everyone’s haunting: losing all our precious memories along the way.

What volumes are we talking about?

During our first world tour, we didn’t even have cameras. We were just taking pictures and videos with our phones.

We were far from being paparazzi but after a year we took about 5000 pictures.

At an average rate of 5 MB per photo, we already reach 250 GB.

I don’t remember the number or weight of our videos but it goes up very quickly if we film in high definition. Let’s assume that it doubles the volume to 500 GB.

And as a reminder, we tended to take few pictures.

500 GB is considerable. For comparison, an iPhone can store a maximum of 256 GB.

Old school methods: backup on physical media

Many travelers still do this.

The basic idea is to use one SD card per country. When you leave the country, you send the SD card of the country you have just visited by mail to relatives so that they can keep it warm.

First problem: it’s going to be expensive. A 128 GB SD card costs about twenty euros on Amazon. You’ll have to add shipping costs.
Second problem: the more SD cards you send, the more likely it is that one of them will not arrive safely. The most far-sighted duplicate the SD card while waiting for confirmation of receipt, but it starts to become a complicated logistics.
Third problem: an SD card doesn’t have an unlimited lifespan, it can break at any time.

Others use external hard drives , but that seems like a very bad idea: it weighs a lot, takes up space, can get lost, stolen, broken. Plus it means storing everything on a single medium: too much risk of losing everything!

Backup in the cloud

Many services offer you to store your files in the cloud. The principle: you have to upload your files to this service, it will store them securely. Once done, you can destroy your files to make room, you will only need an internet connection to view and download all your files.

There are more and more players in the cloud, we will mention three of them:

Apple (via iCloud)
Google (via Google Drive)
Dropbox

These three services are particularly reliable, have been in existence for years and are managed by major players.

On the other hand, you will have to put your hand in your pocket, knowing that the prices are very similar between services:

iCloud: 9.99 € / month for 2TB of storage
Google Drive : 9,99 € / month for 1TB of storage
Dropbox: 9.99 € / month for 2TB of storage.

Note that for Google, through Google Photos, the service is free and unlimited if you accept a slight decrease in the resolution of your photos (if they have a resolution greater than 16 Mega pixels). This is what we did during our first world tour. Honestly, if you don’t plan to print your photos on giant posters, that seems to me quite enough.

I know that some people find it psychologically difficult to trust cloud services and are afraid of losing their data.

Frankly, there is no such thing as zero risk, but :

We’re talking about actors whose job it is to back up files
Your files are backed up in ultra-secure data centers, ventilated to avoid hardware failures due to high temperatures, monitored by guards 24 hours a day. It’s something other than your hard drive that will travel to the bottom of your backpackers bag
Files stored in the cloud are redundant, meaning that they are replicated in at least two different data centers in different geographical areas. Do you know why? So that there is still a backup of your files if a nuclear bomb hits a data center (no joke)
If by chance you made a mistake and deleted files from your cloud service, most of them still allow you to recover them for X days.

There is always the possibility of data loss due to human error in these services. This happened in 2015 to a handful of Google users for example.

But anyway, it is 100 or 1000 times more secure than your old school method based on SD cards or external hard drive.

How to transfer my files to my tablet / phone / computer

To save your photos and videos in the cloud, you will first need to transfer them to your computer, phone or tablet. From there you will be able to use the iCloud / Google Photos / Dropbox software for backup.

If you have a camera that offers bluetooth transfer, that’s fine.

If you have a computer with you, that’s easy too, you just need the adapter that works well if you don’t have an SD drive.

Likewise for a tablet or a phone, you will need to purchase an adapter

If you have an Apple device, we recommend this adapter that we use.

For Android devices, this adapter looks great but I haven’t tested it by myself.

The internet problem

The only problem with backing up in the cloud is that you have to have internet. And given the volumes we’re talking about, an Internet connection that is as efficient as possible. Which isn’t always possible when traveling in certain parts of the world.

But it’s manageable, you just have to find once or twice a month the hotel or restaurant that has the connection that goes well to save everything. You can use this trick to try to find a place with a good connection (knowing that in the case of backup, it is the upload connection speed that is important).

The key word is redundancy

As I mentioned above, even if backing up in the cloud is very secure, there is still a very small amount of risk.

The secret to never losing a file is to have it in at least two different places.

The cloud is considered a place. We must try to have a second one.

During your trip, keep the files on the media you have for as long as you have space

During our first trip around the world, I had my computer. I saved everything in the cloud and I kept the photos on the computer at the same time. When the lack of space became apparent, I started to sort out the poor quality photos, and then I deleted the videos that I thought might be interesting, …

And once you’re done with your trip: download all your files from the cloud to save them on another support: computer, external hard drive or even… second cloud service 🙂