How to Backup Your Files While Travelling

That beautiful photo. The one with the Bedouin posing next to the camel in the sunset, wistful look in his eyes. The one that was going to win you National Geographic’s photo competition and set your name in stone as the next big thing. Except you lost it when your computer got nicked on the Cambodian border.

Nothing can beat the pain of losing photography. As the daughter of an IT manager, I was taught “BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVES!” like a religious mantra. For the first half of our world trip I carried around two 500GB portable hard drives in my backpack. While it seemed like a good idea in Sydney, carrying them around was a pain in the butt. Despite their small size, they still took up space, then there were the cords, then I had to connect them to the computer every time I wanted to play music.

I recently looked around for a solution to replace the hard drives. Thankfully the era of cloud computing has arrived. It’s now easy to backup your files while travelling.

Music Files

Apple introduced the iCloud as a way to back up files across multiple computers. While their pricing system is more expensive than a standard cloud backup service, the one advantage is being able to use your iTunes library from the cloud using an Internet connection. No more need to connect a portable hard drive, no more taking up space on the computer. It also means I can share music across two computers without having to use up valuable space on my hard drives. With over 18,000 songs in my iTunes database, iCloud is very convenient. If you are travelling with a point and shoot, and use iPhoto to manage your photography, iCloud would be a practical solution for all your backups.

Photography and Documents

As for my photography files and documents, I recently purchased a subscription to Backblaze. It was recommended by a couple of photographers across different forums. Backblaze works in the background through an internet connection, uploading your files to a secure server without draining your bandwidth. I was skeptical about their claims, but after a month my thousands of RAW camera files have been backed up seamlessly with no effort on my part. I tested their restore function and within minutes I had downloaded one of my images. They offer multiple options for restore: download a zip file or at an extra cost receive your files on USB or portable hard drive. The cost is about $4 per month depending on your package.