Nowadays it's cheap enough to back up to portable hard drives, rather than to CDs. If you pay $10 for a 50-pack of CDs that's around $0.30/GB. At that price 250GB would cost you $75, which is about what you pay for a 320GB 2.5" drive in a USB enclosure. And, of course, it's a heck of a lot easier to search an external drive than to search through 50 CDs.
I've got a 250GB drive to take along with me on trips, and a pair of 500GB drives at home. I don't delete images from my cards until I've got at least two copies - generally one on the notebook and one on the travelling USB drive. (I've also got space on a RAID server outside the house, but that's a whole different story). As for the number of cards - I'd take enough cards for a couple of days shooting. How much capacity that is depends on you. If you shoot 500 RAW images a day, that's perhaps 10GB of PEFs (or twice that for DNGs). If you only shoot 200 images a day you're probably OK with what you have, although 2GB cards are pretty cheap ($10 for Transcend, $13 for Sandisk Ultra IIs). 4GB SDHC cards aren't much more expensive (Newegg sell the Transcend card, packaged with an SDHC reader, for $11.25 - that's what I'm currently using in my K10D). On Sat, Apr 04, 2009 at 10:55:57PM -0500, Christine Aguila wrote: > Hi Everyone: > > On our last vacation (a 7 day road trip), every night in the hotel I > downloaded my pics onto my laptop & backed them up on cds. > > In anticipation of GFM, does anybody have any alternative suggestions? > As recommended, I will be bringing my laptop, but we'll be camping, and I > just wondered what other folks do about pic storage. GFM recommends > bringing a laptop if you want to participate in the photo contest. Do > most folks bring a laptop? > > Also, I only own three 2 gig memory cards. I do plan to purchase more > for the trip--but I'd be interested in knowing how many cards folks > bring--to use as a ballpark. > > Thanks in advance. Cheers, Christine > > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
