Photo storage on the go

I love travelling, and when I do - I always take a camera with me, capturing the places I've seen and moments I want to remember. For the past two and a half years I've had the 400D Canon DSLR and its counter is getting close to the 20,000 photos mark. Those are a lot of great memories, but also quite a bit of storage space, especially since I always shoot in RAW format to have the flexibility for future editing. I some cases, I actually shoot RAW+JPEG, so that I can easily browse and share photos during the trip using the JPEGs, and the RAW files are for later storage and editing when I get back home. And when the trips get longer, there's the question of how to store all those photos on go.

The simple choice at first is just having more and bigger memory cards. I got to carrying 3 cards with 4Gb each, and this would usually be sufficient for my normal two-week trips. But there's a limit, and when I was preparing for my 7 months long trip to South East Asia last year, I had think of another way. 

First of all, just buying more and more memory cards is expensive, hard to carry and manage, and I wouldn't want to store too much on a single card. A common solution is to have a portable hard drive - it's easy to use, has plenty of storage space, reliable, relatively inexpensive and useful in itself in daily life even after the trip. However, since I wasn't carrying a laptop this meant relying on external computers, which isn't trivial on a trip to SE Asia. Internet Cafes are usually not hard to find on the beaten track of trekkers, but the quality of computers varies greatly and many of them are infected with myriad viruses transmitted by different USB devices. So finding a reasonable computer, scanning it for viruses and using it to copy the photos from the card to the hard drive it a rather long and annoying procedure.  A bigger problem was the longer treks, such as the Annapurna Circuit, which take several weeks with no computer access.

My solution was a portable hard drive with a twist, in a metal case with an internal battery and a built-in card reader - Nexto ND2700. The main advantage of this device is that is can directly copy photos from the memory card, without the need for a computer or even electricity. The charge is sufficient to copy some 80Gb of photos, which gives you more than enough travel time between recharges. The device itself is basically a sturdy metal case with a laptop hard-drive inside - it's even easy to open the case and replace it. And besides travelling, it is useful as a regular portable hard drive with a USB connection. I've had it for a year and a half now, and the only disadvantages I can think of are that it's a little more cumbersome to use than a regular portable drive, since it has it's own power button; and the price - when I bought it, the 250Gb model cost about twice as much as simple hard drive with the same capacity.

So who would I recommend such a device for? It is mostly useful if you take lots of photos, usually RAW on a DSLR (since JPEGs from compact cameras take much less space) and might travel for several weeks at least with no laptop or reliable access to computers. Otherwise, a regular portable hard drive would probably suffice.