Hi All,

I'm fairly certain most internet cafes around the world have CD burners; but how common are DVD burners?

I take a lot of high res raw images and the thought of trying to backup gigabytes of photos on CD's is a concern.

With the cost of USB flash drives being low these days; I suppose backing up to one of those and mailing it home is an option; but DVD's are much cheaper than USB flash drives....

What are the options and tips for backing up photos while on a long term trip?

Jason

In my opinion, any physically stored data is more or less doomed. At some point in time it will be lost, damaged or flawed. Probably your best bet is redundant online storage if you want to be double certain you don't lose anything ever - Upload your photos to two photo storage sites. Either in something like Picasa and/or Flickr. Or in a non-photocentric service like dropbox. I personally use Picasa because the client makes it just one click to upload all my photos.

If you insist on a physical backup, then it's either SD cards, thumbdrives, portable HDs, or discs. I guess it depends on if you want to carry the backup with you (might defeat the purpose) or mail it home. I don't know your situation, but I wouldn't delete your local copy until you can confirm that the mailed copy made it safely. The mail system in many countries is very, "individual results may vary".

I'll be traveling for 1+ years; and uploading gigabytes/terabytes of data to online sites isn't a viable option for me.

I suppose my question is: do a lot of internet cafe's have DVD (not CD) burners these days; and/or do most long term travelers backup on flash drives or alternate camera memory cards?

Shawnosaurus - thanks for the advice about the mail system in other countries and holding on to a copy until receipt is confirmed

Jason