Laptop or photo stoage when on the road
 

Has anyone taken a small laptop (10" screen like the Acer with 160GB HD) with them on the road for sorting and storing photos.
Or is a small HD ok for secondary storage.
I generally use a RAW format so the files are relatively big.

I'm just worried that the laptop will fall to bits being strapped onto a dirtbike for a few months.

I prefer offroad riding where possible.

Any suggestions ?

Kim

Some companies (notably Panasonic) make 'ruggidized' laptops that are designed to cope with dirt, dust, and heavy vibration or shocks. Although these are quite expensive to buy new, a used one (perhaps from eBay) might be the answer for you.

The product line is called "Toughbook". Only problem I can foresee is that they are typically towards the large end of the size range for laptops.

Having said all that - I have carried a regular IBM Thinkpad around in the pannier of my ST1100 for about 10 years, well over 100,000 km, with no problems ever. The ST is, however, not a dirt bike.

Michael

Have you tried a search? Typing "laptop" in the search box, then "sort by date" if you're feeling fussy will turn up dozens of pages addressing exactly this topic. Similarly "netbook." Or just go to the communications section of the HUBB and scroll away: http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hubb/communications/.

Hope that helps.

Mark

(who just had my EEE PC motherboard replaced at no cost despite being woefully out of warranty and having carried the poor thing unpadded on the back of my bike for many tens of thousands of miles)

I'm typing this on a macbook that was in a side pannier (caribou - pelican) when I wiped out on the Dempster highway in northern Canada in July. The pannier popped off and bounced a bit. Unfortunately my leg didn't fare as well. So long as the laptop is tightly packed in something waterproof with lots of padding, it should survive almost anything. When space is at a premium I carry a small backup drive (Hyperdrive Colorspace UDMA) which is 500gb. You can do limited playback but no processing. It worked well during a month long trip to India last year (sans motorbike but had to travel light). I also usually carry enough 32gb CF cards so I don't have to erase them which ensures at least two copies of my images.

+1 on the EEE Pc netbooks, cheap, small in size, and light. Took mine from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Buenos Aires, Argentina last winter then around Europe and Morrocco this summer with. Great battery life and powerful enough to do whatever you need/want while on the road. Had mine in a neoprene sleeve and sometimes had it stashed in the tankbag and sometimes in the panniers with no issues.

Have a blast on your trip!

I went for this option, 250GB ext HDD 2.5" so as to reduce space and not carry and possibly destroy an expensive laptop. This was good but I ran out of space and it still left me open to what happens if the HDD fails as I only had one BIG backup and I was using PC's in internet cafes to backup from my camera SD cards to the HDD.

But let me however restate what I think are the main problems:

Dust, Vibration (will what you are carrying survive a crash?), Humidity, Security, Safeguarding Data, Geographical redundancy, Viruses (when using other Internet Cafe PC's to backup data), Space (arguably the most important consideration), Price.

There are many solutions, even Canon has an external harddisk with SD Card adaptor to backup SD cards but it costs the price of a Netbook at around US$400.

I have friends that just regularly burn CD or DVD's and send them home. (this provided the geographical redundancy, incase all your gear goes in a fire or gets stolen/destroyed).

Personally I like the Idea of having a laptop but the cost and extra gear needed to charge it would cost too much space. Maybe if we didn't take a tent...:Beach:

normal laptops
 

packed in soft luggage ... usually mounted behind the rider, are all you need.

I had a meet up in Mirny in an out of the way corner of Northern Siberia with Josef Pichler, KTMs sponsored adventure rider. Myself, my co rider Sherri Jo and Josef, all flopped out laptops.

Sherri Jo had a garden variety Macbook
I had a 12 inch eee netbook
Josef had a 12 inch Vaio netbook

All just normal garden variety laptops. All made it across Siberia and Mongolia to / from Europe.

Its my second year in a row travelling with a standard eee netbook. No solid state stuff .... just regular spinning hard drive. Josef and Sherri Jo also had regular hard drives.

There's a lot of paranoia about computers ... thinking you need solid state drives. Or thinking you need a very expensive and insanely heavy toughbook.

As far as I am concerned, its a load of old cobblers. Just take a normal netbook, pack it in soft luggage, mounted behind the rider.

Get a new MacBookAir, with Solid State Disk inside. No moving parts, excellent Light 11.5 " perfect travel companion.

Adventurous greetings,
Coen

When going to internet cafes etc. It is a good idea to move the r/w tag to read only. that way your cameras sdhc wont get any unwanted 'extras' added to it.

EEEPC's are the way to go. I carried mine from Japan to Spain no worries. survived desert heat and freezing cold in Finland. My back up 500g hard drive did not fare well for no known reason, so I glad that I didn't delete the photos from my laptop after transferring them to the back up.

Simon

Take a Netbook + 2.5" HD
 

I wouldn't travel without a netbook ever again. Great thing to have on the road. I usually store it vertically in the pannier, the backup HD in the other one. I find SSDs of sufficient size still too expensive and I expect the netbook HD to have a reduced life due to vibrations, not to speak of an accident. Therefore regular backups on the external HD are essential.

With the availibility of internet cafes and photo storage dumps, I imagine it would be easy enough to just install a few mobile apps on a thumb drive with a SD card reader embedded.

If you are building updating a website and editing photos on the road this may not be the best method...

Using mobile apps and internet cafes greatly depends on the upload bandwith of the country you are travelling in, not to mention whether they have internet cafes. In theory uploading to online photo storage dumps (I presume Hillbilly is talking about) can reduce photo resolution to upload. Be careful not to rely entirely on this or any one source for back ups.

Accidents do happen, either with viruses, accidental deletion, corruption, vibration damage or other electronic failures.

Uploading your photos in RAW should stop the decrease in quality when using a photo storage site.

No matter the method, always have back ups and multiple copies. Storage devices are cheap and compact, there is no reason use only one method. I think there are SD cards with 32 Gbs of space on the market. 32!

They are SDHC cards (with max 32GB capacity). SD cards are the older technology and only allow max 2GB. Check your device is compatible with SDHC first otherwise it could be a waste of money.

Also check the class of SDHC memory card you're device needs. For HD 1080p devices you will need at least a transfer rate of 30Mbps which is a Class 6 SDHC or above.

Keep in mind the camera resolutions when choosing a memory card. The higher the resolution the more space it will take and the less photos you can store on any one memory card.

Amazon has competitive prices for 32GB SDHC cards.
Sandisk 32GB SDHC Memory Card: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

depends on where you go, but I should warn you that South America has in places very slow internet connections, so you would not want to depend on that if you would like to dump images to a server....

EEE laptop with a second separate HD and a couple of big (32GB) SD cards is what I have done so far.
After all a 32GB card will allow about 1600 photos (20mb RAW files) on one card, quite a bit if you delete the crappy one as you go.
Uploading big RAW files to a web server might not be very good in reality.

Hardluggage, 2 1/2 years of travelling with a MacBook. Virus-free, never had a problem with the INTERNAL drive. Had anything from tarmac to deep(!) corrugations, sand,...

I had one bad accident where the bike went downhill doing 4-5 summersaults (I luckily came off on the first one, bike going over me). Mainframe mounts for the subframe bolts broke off, top bolt that holds the rear shock in place (hardened steel bolt!) sheared off,... REALLY bad. Laptop was fine, everything else (external drives) as well.

I did, however, have problems with eternal drives. Once because of a power surge (I think) in a hotel with really dodgy electrics. And once because of a loose connection in a usb cable. (Laptop writing to external drive, when the USB cable gave up service).

Personally, I think hard-drive problems don't come from vibration during riding, or from dropping them. An internal drive has never let me down – not on my laptop, and not on my desktops back home.

The other day, I carried my laptop with attached drive from one room to another, hard-drive came off the usb cable and fell down (1m). And this was NOT a rubberized drive – it was a plain WD passport. BUT: the laptop was NOT reading/writing to the drive at that moment.
Drive is fine (I checked the entire drive with 'Drive Genius' – no damaged sectors whatsoever).

Take a small lap top or net book that you can down load information you have collected that day or the day before. I can't for the life of me where you can see any problem's in taking one. If you are using video. then you can down load and see what you have. Same with picture's. You can post on the net saying where you are. And what you are going next. Mine is packed in a leather cover with packing in side, then packed in a large cloth bag with a zip. It has about four layers of packing. And so far it's worked perfect every time. Just get one and you don't need to pay a lot of money for one. remember you are only going to use it for one reason and for a short time.
John933

Many CF cards for my Canon 5D, when the time comes and I need to free up space, I carry a small Wind MSI U100 (hacked to run Snow Leopard) where I store some of my captures, I usually have a small HD as well to make a second backup there.
Netbook travels within a sleeve (ebay...5$) which kind of protects from Vibrations, I pack it on the topbox of my GSA, if I travel without it (never done yet) I will pack it within clothes in my rollback on the pillions seat.
Tripod (small carbon) goes without the head inside the panniers, ballhead is carefully packed inside an old thick t-shirt and takes it place in the topbox as well, camera, lenses usually reside on my back (rarely I will get tired, since I usually carry the same stuff when I hike to the mountains), If I get tired, I try to pack them on top of the rollback (Andystrapz become really handy here for their size and how easily they stretch).

EEE PC, External Hard Drive and few spare camera cards.

Copy (not remove) the photos from the camera card to the external hard drive every night, week. If you fill a card pop in another. That way you have the photos in two places.

The EEE PC is optional for this but makes it easier and you can use it for your blog or whatever.

OK, so I'm stupid but can someone be nice and tell me if there is a way of downloading the daily photo shoot from my camera, which at present I have been downloading just to my netbook, to a card or one of those plugin things from my netbook without affecting the photos already in my netbook or already on my card/plug in thing (flash drive?). Simple words please. Ride safe.

Depends on your Camera software. Some will let you setup a kind of "default" behaviour when you plug the camera or memory card in.

If you can't I would just make a folder with the date and copy the photos (copy not cut) from the card/camera to the laptop and then copy that new days folder to the external hard drive. Keep it simple I say, so you don't get sick of doing it everyday.

Thanks, I'll try that today before heading off to pastures different. Ride safe.

I have used an EEE 900 and 901 with solid state disc as a GPS for years without problems.

I also use an EEE PC (solid-state hard drive) with a separate mechanical hard drive for backup of photos. That mechanical hard drive needs to be well protected and treated gently as even small drops onto a hard surface can drive deceleration forces into the hundreds of G's... well beyond its design capabilities. There's some new technology http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/whit...585_gforce.pdf where the drive detects that it's in free-fall and quickly parks the head in a safe landing zone.

My last portable HD did not survive so well. Very flaky performance, probably because I was not so gentle with it. It just had a metal enclosure with no shock protection at all. I've recently ordered a GIGABYTE - PC Peripherals - External Storage Enclosure - A2 Tiny . It at least has some form of shock protection built in so they say. And now I know better.

I wouldn't want to trust the operation of my main computer to the sensitivities of a mechanical hard drive while on the road. Not so much because the computer can't be packed well during travel, but simply because a small drop once unpacked can screw it.

I used to travel with a HP Mini, with a normal harddrive, and it survived morocco, and romania - if anything can survive both then it should survive anything.

Normal harddrives park the heads when they are powered off, some vendors say that they can survive up to 95G (stop/acceleration), and even powered on some of them will park the heads if they fell movement. I once dropped my Macbook Pro on the floor (30cm), and nothing happend at all (except for a slightly elevated heart rate).

I normally travel with enough memory cards so that I never have to delete anything until I get home, and at the same time keep a copy on my computer. If I was in a situation where I would have to rotate memory cards I would find an online solution for the extra backup - there are a few where one can dump some GB's without being robbed.

Casper

10" netbook + 2.5" ext. HD
 

For two years and 72000km, 1/4 of that on dirt roads in South America, my HP Mini 5001 (aluminum case and waterproof keyboard - designed for educational intitutions) held up well in the pannier. That said, I did have my first blue screen of death recently. I assume the HD starts to fail now, probably a few sectors damaged. I hope it'll make it another 3 months through Mexico. I'll get a new one once I'm in the US. They don't have much to choose from and prices are much higher in Latin America.

I also carry an external 2.5" HD from A-Data (waterproof and rubber case). I used to do backups every month, since I had problems with the netbook HD I back up my photos every two weeks.

On an aside: That waterproof keyboard was worth the investment. A year ago a freshly arrived beer (!) was spilled across it. Apart from a couple of malfunctioning keys the netbook survived. So it's beerproof too :clap:

Sundry advice
 

I took a Dell laptop on a trip from New Jersey to Costa Rica and back. Looking back that laptop was on the heavy side, but had no problems with the hard drive. Always packed it in a cushioned sleeve and on top of other soft stuff. Consider tossing your laptop in a backpack if that works for you.

Replaced the Dell with a MSI that went to India for a few months on business. Towards the end of the stay I failed to use the surge protected power strip at the office one day, and the AC jack was wrecked by the drips in power that I had gotten accustom. Recently got a "Mini Mobile Surge Protectors by Targus" which should protect my equipment on the next trip. Cheap, compact, and always in place. A nice combo.

There is a new class of laptops call "Ultra Books", they run with solid state hard drives (like the chip in thumb/jump drive) and have other specification that are great for travel (ex. long battery life.) I couldn't wait for the ultr books to come out and last fall got a Toshiba Portege, large enough for my big hands, made of light plastic (quickly got a cracked corner when it fell off the bed.) Saw a Toshiba ultra that a friend got recently and was very jealous. It was very thin, back lit keyboard, light in weight and ~9 battery life. Toshiba isn't the only maker of ultra books. Intel set the standard and pour millions in to the marketing. For computer manufacturers to use the name ultra book on their products, they have to follow the specification laid out by Intel.

My Toshiba has an SD card reader, which is great for copying photos without having connect the camera with a cable. I agree, copy, don't move photos from your SD card, then back up to a small external hard drive and post the best pictures to an online storage service. I use Google's services and applications, but there are others. Am interested to hear opinions and experiences others have had with online photo storage services. Google provides a photo management and lite photo editing application called Picasa. It works hand and glove with the online service, so its easy to upload photos. You can quickly have photos "favorites", then post only the best to online storage. This process saves time backing up photos while online. I was a professional photographer for many many years, so I take a LOT of pictures when I get rolling. Selecting the best shot out of variations is quick and easy with Picasa. I suggest practicing with whatever equipment and software you choose before hitting the road.

I have heard that some folks burn their images to CDROM while on the road, but I think that is an old strategy.

Learn how to ask if you can take a picture in whatever country you are in. Learn the simple way to say it, so it's an informal request, make it fun. Buy a little something from the person if you can.

Shot early and often!

Euh... that doesn't exist.
In an Air there is Flashdrive, so already no physical HD, so it is the same as your flashdrives etc...

Anyways, I use a 11" MacBookAir with a 1GB external HD. Works PERFECT.
And yes, I do offroad and yes, they both survived africa and europe etc...

I am no fan (=I hate) anything from Windows, so if you are willing to spend the money take the Air, wheights nothing, is solid and take the Apple Care Protection plan for 3 years. Basically you don't pay if something goes wrong with your mac. And it always could happen driving offroad... ;-)