Safeguarding Your Travel Memories On the Road

Two recent incidents were reminders that I need to get new travel insurance organized, but one event also reminded me of the importance of safeguarding your travel memories on the road.

One half of an adventurous travel blogging couple who have climbed mountains and trekked wilderness areas recently had an accident while on a morning walk on a luxury cruise they were doing in South America. Dave had to be evacuated by helicopter and flown home to Canada where he’s now beginning a recovery process that could take months.

It’s something that could happen to anyone and is reason enough to take out travel insurance that includes emergency evacuation and medical expenses.

In another incident, a traveller recently had her laptop stolen from the beach-house she was renting with all her photos, videos and journal notes from her year-long round the world trip. It seems that I read about this happening every few months.

She hadn’t been backing up, she didn’t have a spare back-up drive hidden anywhere, and she wasn’t able to track her laptop. She was also staying in a town on an island in Thailand where the police were less than enthusiastic about tracking down the thieves that had torn the house apart. So that was it. It was all gone – a year’s worth of travel memories.

I’ve written about travel insurance before, encouraging you to not even to hesitate in taking it out. I’ve read a lot of bad advice out there on the web about travel insurance. It tends to come from people who have taken out travel insurance on every holiday they’ve done and never had to use it, so decided not to take it out on a trip – only to have their luggage lost by the airline or holiday plans ruined by missed connections due to bad weather or, worse, get injured in an accident.

We’re travelling today, so I always get anxious when we have to go anywhere without it. But I’m still researching the best insurance for our circumstances, which are different to the average holidaymaker in that we are continually travelling for our work, and we also have a lot of technology and camera equipment.

We have an excuse. Travel insurance is a lot more complicated for professional travellers. But you don’t – especially when travel insurance can start at as little as $15 as a basic policy with Southern Cross Travel Insurance does. I’ve not seen any cheaper than that for Australians in my research. If you have, let us know.

Having said that, a good travel insurance policy will cover the replacement of your camera, laptop or tablet, but it won’t replace those travel memories if you don’t take some precautions…

Our Tips for Safeguarding Your Travel Memories On the Road

Laptops and backing-up

• Before you travel back up everything on your laptop onto a cloud and a portable hard drive and leave the drive in a secure place at home.
• Use cloud services such as Crashplan or Backblaze to do online back-ups. They cost about $5 a month, so it’s like a cheap insurance!
• You also need to be backing up to the cloud every day while you’re on the road. If you’re in a place with good Internet, Crashplan and Backblaze will do it automatically for you every time you plug in.
• Also back up to a portable hard drive overnight. We use SuperDuper to do this.
• Keep that portable back-up hard drive separate to your laptop. If you’re leaving your laptop in the hotel room safe, then either store the back-up drive in the hotel’s safe or take it with you when you’re going out for the day.
• Not all portable hard drives are reliable, so give the cheap ones a miss and spend a bit more on quality drives. We only use Western Digital hard drives to back up our laptops and to store and back up our photos.
• As an added precaution create a back-up of the back-up drive, so you have two duplicate drives. Why? Because we have still had plenty of drives die, mainly the older drives. As a pro-photographer, Terence organizes his drives by destination.
• It’s worth noting that if you lose your drives and you don’t have a duplicate, Backblaze will create a hard drive for you from your files stored on the cloud and FedEx it to you if you need it.

Cameras and Photos

• Photo memory cards can get lost, stolen or damaged, so there’s always a chance you could lose your photos even before you’ve downloaded them from the camera and backed them up, so make sure you download and back-up your photos every day. Don’t wait until the memory card is full.
• Only use good quality memory cards for your cameras, such as SanDisk. Terence believes these are the most reliable based on his professional experience.
• Keep your memory cards in cool, dry places and use a memory card wallet.

iPhones

• So many people are leaving them cameras at home these days and using their iPhones to take all their photos and videos, so you need to take precautions with your phones too. (We are Apple users so we can only advise you on iPhones.)
• iPhones are increasingly being targeted by petty thieves, especially in Southeast Asia, so avoid carrying them in your hands or pockets when you’re walking around the streets. If you must use them, go indoors somewhere.
• Once again, download your photos nightly from your iPhone to your laptop and then back them up to a dedicated photo drive. Terence generally does downloads like these on long flights, trains or bus rides.
• Apple’s complete solution is still in Beta, but in the meantime you can also upload them to dropbox. Fees apply.
• If you take a lot of photos – and we’ve met travellers who are shooting nearly as much as a pro photographer such as Terence is shooting each day – then Amazon Prime is a cloud service that offers unlimited photo storage through apps and has automatic uploads.
• Just be careful if you haven’t replaced your SIM card with a local SIM and are using roaming from home, as high charges will apply unless you’re using the hotel WiFi to do it.
• If your iPhone is stolen, you can use find my iPhone to locate it.
• If you think there’s no chance of recovering it, then you can also remote erase.

If you have any different tips on travel insurance or advice when it comes to safeguarding your travel memories on the road we’d love to hear from you in the comments below.