As a travel photographer, I (Andrew here) am always trying to find better ways to keep my gear safe while country hopping. In 2010 Brock backpacked around the world. If this wasn’t amazing enough, along the way he maintained a fabulous travel blog complete with fresh HD video, photos, and commentary from his adventures. As a friend of mine and a great guy in general, Brock was generous enough to share what he’s learned about traveling with tech. ~Andrew
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To protect your tech gear, there a few simple ways you can prevent it from being broken or stolen.
Laptop:
Find a water resistant, well padded laptop case. Most cases on the market are thin and flimsy. Think of the case as a helmet for your laptop. The cheaper and thinner the helmet the less likely it is going to protect against an impact. If you are going to spend 100′s if not 1000′s of dollars on your laptop, then you should be willing to spend around $50 for a great laptop case. For those travelling with a Macbook, check out the Coated Canvas Sleeve by Incase.
For ultra protection, in the event that your laptop gets stolen, check out ‘LoJack for Laptop‘. They will track your laptop when the thief turns it on. That said, be sure to read the terms and conditions first to make sure you activate it properly.
Camera:
To film around the world, I used the Panosonic Lumix DMC ZS3. Not only did it take great photos and videos (shoots in HD with stereo audio), it was more subtle then a video camera. People tend to freeze up when they see a video camera but act naturally when you pull out a ‘point and shoot’. Camera’s in general are very fragile so I used a Lowepro Case with extra cushioning and it even has it’s own rain poncho. Excessive? Nope! Get stuck in a Kenyan rain storm like I did and you’ll be glad you had it.
External Hard Drive:
Backing up your videos and photos is just as important as protecting the items that create them. My favourite is the Lacie Rugged 500 GB with USB and Firewire. It survived my year around the world and kept my files safe. Other then when I was in transit, I always kept my laptop and external hard drive in separate places to ensure that they didn’t both get stolen or damaged at the same time.
In addition to the above suggestions for keeping your gear safe, be sure to have a sturdy daypack and excellent travel insurance. Finding insurance for technology is pretty tricky and it will rarely cover ‘everything’, that said I found the best coverage for my gear with World Nomads.
Finally, and above all, keep an eye on your stuff. It takes only a second for someone to grab your bag. Always keep it with you (even take it to the bathroom), spoon with it at night and while in transit, and put the strap around your arm or leg when in restaurants.
It may seem a bit obsessive to do all these things when you are travelling but if something goes missing, it can put a pretty big damper on your trip.
There’s a free software called Prey that lets you keep track of your phone or laptop if it gets stolen. I’d recommend that before buying anything that does the same job > http://preyproject.com/
Nice informative post for those who traveler with such gear to protect. Our than my MacBook and iphone I have limited tech gear. This could be more useful for me down the road though.
This may be obvious but you need to test your back ups as well. It pointless to have a backup of any sort (windows, data, your sites) if the back ups doesn’t work.
My friend backed up his site with backup buddy (wp plugin) to later find out that it was useless.
So backup your backups !
Great point Luke. Even after checking, there’s not real guarantee that the disk will keep spinning after you check. I think the future of data storage includes storage devices with no moving parts and the main enemy being product material integrity rather than parts getting shifted out of line.
I LOVE my Lacie rugged!
Do you back-up or synch your drive to another drive? If so, what software do you use? I currently just drag and drop my files to another drive but hate having to remember or manually compare which files have been modified.
I just drag and drop. A bit more time consuming and you have to be careful you get everything, but I created a date system to make it easier.
Nice, same here about the date system. I label all the folders in my photography folder as YYMMDD – Title (i.e. 110708 – Fiji)(I didn’t really go to Fiji though
. This keeps them in order and also makes it easy to navigate.
I click and drag but have a million folders to tell me what exactly it is. Like, Country – City – Modified, etc.
Andrew,
I use a product named NTI Shadow. It’s very reasonably priced and it does scheduled backups. You can define precisely what you want backed up from any drive or folder to any other drive or folder. Best thing about it is that it doesn’t save your files in some sort of proprietary file but saves everything just as it is.
Hope you find it useful.
Bobby
If you’re an avid photographer, you should look into an online backup solution like JungleDisk or Carbonite. After I download my photos, my laptop automagically connects to Amazon’s S3 storage service via JungleDisk and backs up my Aperture library via the Internet. This often takes most of the night, but a worthy reason to buy the hotel’s often overpriced Internet.