I just did 10 days in Panama. Took a Fastrax 30GB which I had owned for a while and a brand new Apacer 200 Disk Steno. The Apacer was the far better choice. Much faster burning CD's than the Fastrax copying to the hard disk. It also does verification and automatic disk spanning for large CF cards. Better battery life too. Only drawback is no review of .crw files like the Fastrax. Highly recommended. Nice secure feeling to see a stack of verified CD's.

Using a portable storage tank is the best solution on a trip.  I used an Image Tank in Alaska, so I only needed two 512 cards and a 384 card.  I shot RAW and just kept emptying the card to the hard drive in the tank, and then reformatted in the camera.  Came out of it with something like 7.5 GB of images.

Then there's the issue of editing your images...... ???

Charlie - thanks for the word of caution.

My understanding was that low air pressure was only an issue for Microdrives, as the platters are so close together. For a normal hard disk, this is not a problem. Certainly, I have exchanged emails with people who have used partable hard disks and laptop computers at over 5000m without problems.

In any case, I will let you all know how I get on. I'm off on Saturday...

Julian

I recently returned from a trip to Thailand and Cambodia. During the trip, I shot 100% digitally and previously did quite a bit of research about what devices to use in order to back up my photos each day.

The article's here:
http://www.stephenvoss.com/Gmini220/

Comments and questions are appreciated.

Good to hear of your experiences. I am off to Nepal in ten days for a 3 week holiday including a trek to Everest base camp.

I'm taking a Canon 10D, with two 1GB CF cards and a Vosonic XS II 40Gb portable storage device. My main concern is that I will be away from power for 15 nights while shooting 100 frames each day. So i'm taking eight BP511s to power the camera, and an external AA battery holder for the Vosonic.

I'm not taking a CD writer as backup, but will take my EOS 3 with 10 rolls of film for recording some of the classic scenic shots.

Will post a link to my full report when I get back!

Cheers, Julian

careful with using a portable hard drive at altitude. i will be in nepal in october for a month and have been researching my storage options.

any hard drive is not recommended to be used above 10,000'. lack of air pressure when the disk is being used could result in damage. just in case you weren't aware, you may want to consider other means to back up your images when you'll be above 10k. which is pretty much from namche and up.

have fun,
charlie.