Tuesday’s Travel Essentials – a portable hard drive
Today’s Tuesday’s Travel Essentials focuses on the very thing we now rely on in this digital age – photos and videos! And the need to have them saved, stored, uploaded and backed up. With this in mind, portable hard drives have become an absolute travel essential for me.
My current hard drive is a 1TB from Toshiba
Indeed this post has pros and cons to it, but the one things that I must stress is BACK UP ALL YOUR PHOTOS AND VIDEOS, and ON A REGULAR BASIS!!! I can’t stress it enough. I have had 4 (FOUR) portable hard drives break in the last 6 years of my travels and am gutted that every photo I took between 2005 – 2009 on my digital camera is now lost forever (except those uploaded onto Facebook or my Blog!!).
A bulky hard drive – I used to own one of these – not ideal for travelling round the world with!!
When I first started travelling properly, I owned a wind up camera, a Sony walkman with a tape deck and a mobile phone. That was 2003. These days I couldn’t live without my laptop, a digital camera, the internet and a portable hard drive. However in the last 5 years I have yet to find a portable hard drive that is good. If you find one, let me know please! Every portable hard drive I have had has broken within a year – makes that stupid sound and then konks out and that’s it gone – with all my photos and videos. Except for once when my stupid ex girlfriend dropped my hard drive on the floor and it stopped instantly, removing 4 years worth of travel photos in an instant.
My hard drives always break – if you have any knowledge of how to get the data off them let me know!
In fact this post is in many ways a plea for two things from my fellow nomadic travellers:
1. If you know of any decent portable hard drives let me know. I’ve been through lots of them and hate them all.
2. If you know how to recover data from a broken hard drive please let me know!
Another couple of my broken hard drives…
OK, so all that aside here are the pros and cons of taking portable hard drives on your travels with you:
Pros:
– You can store all your travel files on them (photos, videos, documents)
– You can back them up every night on your travels as long as you have electricity
– They are small and easily portable
– You can share your photos with others by copying your files to their laptops
In 2007 I visited the Empire State Building in New York – the photo only exists thanks to Don’t Stop Living and Facebook!
Cons:
– They always break
– They can be stolen easily
– They can get damaged easily
Just a short and sweet bulletin today as I plan my next two trips! Off to Luoping in China in a few days then got Malaysia and Brunei coming next. Loving this lifestyle of travel and hoping to inspire you all to get out and see the world! Check my advertising page if you have an idea for a product for my Tuesday’s Travel Essentials.
Will certainly keep the details in mind for my laptop data recovery especially in case of travelling, thanks!!