TheLaptopJunction

With the arrival of Digital Camera's the need for storage has grown immensely. Nowadays owning a 5M pixel camera is normal, creating pictures worth a few megabytes a piece. For short holiday trips the camera storage card or the laptop harddisk is sufficient to store a few hundred pictures. Equipment doesn't really suffer, digital camera is stored in a safe place, so what's the problem? On top of that, pictures are easily stored on remote backup storage locations with the average broadband Internet connection. (Facebook, Google Picasa)

When traveling for more than 3 years in a row, a whole different backup storage situation emerges;

1. Digital equipment suffers big-time. Heat, dust, shocks etc increases the risk of failure
2. The need for (picture) storage increases exponentially every month
3. The risk of partial / full loss of storage increases (theft,)
4. Access to broadband Internet is limited (GPRS/EDGE) for online storage
5. Bigger harddisks increases the risk of bigger data loss

Sending DVD's / CD's by papermail "home" is the most obvious method to secure large amounts of data. However, papermail is insecure, unreliable and prone to being damaged on the way. In 3 years time, several packages with data DVD/CD's have been lost, damaged and opened. From Asia and the Middle East this method is not one to solely rely on.

On top of that specially DVD's tend to have an incompatibility issue - not all drives read the DVD's burned with other DVD drives. A few DVD's proved unreadable among 2 of 3 DVD drive's. This makes CD's the only reliable way to send large amounts of data "home" if it makes the journey back "home".

Basically when traveling, reliable storage can best be found "online", using - large volume - quick storage servers like free GMAIL. Using the GMAIL SMTP mail server it is possible to send large amounts of data (upto several Mb attachments) into the free GMAIL inbox. This is possible using GPRS/EDGE connections if stable enough during 20-30 minutes in a row - assuming a flat-fee rate. Otherwise it's best to locate an Internet Cafe which allows direct cable connections with a laptop to be able to use GMAIL SMTP mail servers.