SD card backup?

Talking to a friend the other day he said he backed his pictures up onto a netbook at the end of each day during a weeks holiday. I was a little surprised by this as if I needed extra storage I'd just buy a few more SD cards. They're certainly cheap enough. After I mentioned this the tone changed and it seemed to be a double or even triple backup "issue" as one of his cards failed once. So what do you guys do?

I've done this for a while now, a good way to use a device that has little or no s/h value, but can still be pressed into good use.

It's only got Picasa installed, which allows a quick preview of what's been shot,

I just take 2 or 3 cards with me.

Yes that's what I do. Out of interest what capacity cards are you using?

I don't think SD cards are an ideal backup media - unless you're using a K3, then the dual card slots do provide a convenient solution for this. But SD cards are still relatively expensive for storage, and they're not really designed for repeated copy / move / deleting-type operations I don't believe.

These days, power supplies permitting, it makes sense to take a small laptop of some kind - on an extended trip I would use double layer DVDs as a cheap way to copy each days shots from SD cards. You could even post your DVDs now and then to your home or to someone else as a disaster recovery method. A copy of your shots on the laptop and another on DVDs somewhere else and you could confidently re-use your SD cards as you go.

I take my laptop with me and copy the RAW images onto it from the SD cards. As a backup I then burn the RAW files on to a DVD from the laptop.
David

PPG: http://www.pentaxphotogallery.com/artists/davidtrout

Each day on holiday has aits own SD card. Each evening we transfer the images to a laptop, but we keep the SD cards. This means we have two copies until we get home. Then the SD cards are transferred to the main PCs, after which the they can be formatted ready for use again.

SD cards don't cost very much and currently I rotate eight or so 8GB cards. As I shoot JPEG only as a rule, this gives plenty of capacity. Sue doesn't use as many cards as I do, so she has a slightly different workflow, but she still keeps two copies until we get home.

I use 2 cameras and never anything bigger than 8GB. The bigger and faster the card, the more likely (IMHO) it is to fail.

I change the cards every day, that way if I lose all the data from one card I have the shots from the other camera so should only ever lose 1/2 a day's worth.

Copy to a laptop every evening, and sometimes I have had to during the day. A second copy to DVD/CD/portableHDD too.

I copy everything to my netbook, or His Nibs laptop if I don't have the netbook with me. I also copy it all to a small Samsung 300Gb mini hard drive. I only reuse the SD card if I need to.

Belt and two sets of braces, but the mini harddrive makes it easy to transfer everything to the PC when I get home, and on longer trips I have to reuse my SD cards.

I use a netbook on holiday, get a better preview than the screen on the camera Have an external HD so will transfer files to that too.

If I'm on holiday, the SD cards get copied to the laptop HDD, and I'd try to have enough SD cards to not need to overwrite any while away.

So two copies till I get home, wherever possible.

I'd never use SD cards as backup unless there really was no alternative. They can fail, and they're small, so easy to lose.

Where do you all keep your laptop when you are on holiday? Most are surely too big to fit in the average hotel room safe - or do you lug them around all day?

The dimensions of my netbook is less than 1/2 the size of my laptop and that's why the laptop stays at home

Use a Kensington lock to attach it to a strong point and remove the Laptop's Hard Drive and put that in the safe.