Storing Pictures While Backpack Travelling?

Amgine007 asks: "A friend of mine will be leaving in January 2004 for a 12-to-18-month 'around the world' trip. He's pretty technically saavy, but not really much of a computer-and-gadgets geek. He has an interesting problem: How do you live out of a backpack for a year (or more) and manage to take and save a lot of digital pictures (say 10,000), if you will have very few connections to the outside world -- few sources of power (at the odd hostel or train station outlet), no internet, and no USB?"

"He hasn't yet purchased a digital camera, so any camera or convergence device to be available in the next 6 months is fair game.

We've thought of a few scenarios. Bringing along a ton of CF cards is neither cheap nor reliable -- suppose the media gets lost or damaged. An ideal solution might involve being able to mail media home, while still having a copy 'on the road' in case that media gets lost in the mail.

And isn't it about time we see consumer devices with support for firewire drives, such as the iPod? I envision a digital camera that can talk (and backup) to an iPod -- this would be more than enough storage in a 15gb model, and small enough to take backpacking painlessly. However, the new models feature a proprietary dock connector, which makes one the iPod's old great advantages -- charge from any firewire port! -- a thing of the past.

A camera that burns images to a CD would be nice, but only if the CD was secondary storage -- ie, save pictures to internal buffer, burn to N CDs, erase internal buffer. This would allow the easy creation of duplicates, but might require a lot of CDs.

How would you plan your gadgets, given 6 more months of advancement of new technology (and price-cuts on old tech)? There's a whole lot of neat camera-ready devices coming about about now, so there could be quite a few creative ideas. Winning solution is the simplest and most portable."

Comments

Stand Alone Data Storage - oh the power of google

[malakai]

Here's a list of DIGITAL CAMERA ACC-Stand Alone Data Storage devices from B&H.

You don't want firewall, most cameras do the USB 2.0 thing.

In addition to storing pictures, many of these Devices are MP3 players as well. 10,20,30 even 60 gig drives with rechargable batteries..etc.

have fun.

-malakai

Terapin Mine

[ottothecow]

the Terapin Mine has 10gb of space that you can store to with your digital camera (also has tons of other ports)

with an ethernet connection (using built in port) or a pcmcia modem you could email your pictures back home whenever you can find a convienient connection. Also backs up to windows and linux and can play movies/music with its built in output ports.

All of this in a 7x3.2x1" package

Re:Don't discount CF cards quite yet

[Ryan Stortz]

TechTV tested a few different types of cards. They dropped them in water, lit them on fire, and even ran over them with a truck. Most types stopped working after getting soaked or fried, but the compact flash card still worked...that is, until they ran it over with a 1 ton truck.

X's drive

[TheGratefulNet]

found on compgeeks:

X's drive

the usb2.0 version works well with linux. the usb1.1 version doesn't (for me, at least).

put any size notebook drive in there you want.

Vosonic X's Drive II

[pr00f]

I've picked up an X's Drive II and have to say it is one of the best devices for the on-the-go digital photographer. With sizes up to 60 GB, and six types of digital media readers built in, you can click away, transfer and go back to clicking away withing seconds. Highly recommended.