Ultimate Antarctica January 5–February 1, 2008

NOTE: Read Part 1 of Joe and Mary Ann's article by clicking HERE.

If you are a digital photographer, there is one rule you cannot afford to break when you are on a trip. If you break this rule, you run the risk of returning without a single memorable image. It’s a rule every digital photographer knows, but nonetheless it is a rule that is frequently broken.

If you’re planning on joining us next January on the Van Os Ultimate Antarctica trip, adhering to this rule is doubly important—there are no FedEx, UPS or DHL deliveries in the South Atlantic Ocean to bail you out should you break the rule. You’re on your own, or at the mercy of friends on the boat if you break the rule.

Okay, so what’s the rule already! Digital backup. As simple as that. Although backup of digital files seems basic, many photographers have an erroneous idea of what digital backup truly means. Here’s what it is not.

Digital backup is not simply downloading your files from your camera’s CF card to your Epson, Jobo or similar portable data storage device, or even to your laptop computer. It would be backup if you didn’t reformat your cards after doing so, but instead left all the image files on them. Of course, virtually no one does this. Instead, we reformat and reuse our CF cards again and again.

So copying your CF files to a drive is not backup. It is just a transfer and you are left with only that one copy of the data. Should anything go wrong with the storage device you transferred that data to—should that device break, be corrupted or get lost or stolen—you’ve lost all of the images that were stored within that device. The images from your trip would then be lost forever and that, we assure you, will make you an unhappy camper.

Digital backup means having at least two copies of your images on separate storage devices so that if one copy is lost, you’ll still have a duplicate copy. You could take this further and do a third backup for even more insurance, so that if two devices failed, you’d still have a copy. You might want to consider a third copy for shoots that are very important to you—just in case.

Please remember that a digital backup or copy is an exact replica, a perfect copy- clone-mirror image of the original. Unlike with film, where a copy is indeed a second-generation treatment where degradation does occur, with digital, a copy merely repeats the sequence of 0s and 1s that make up the data. For example, 00101001 as an original is the same as the copy 00101001—the same data is transferred. That’s a simplistic example, of course, since the number of 0s and 1s in a digital image would exceed the 8 bits in this example by an almost incomprehensible number.

	You can download while on the boat if you’re short on cards, but remember while you’re in your cabin you might miss your best shots.

There are a variety of ways to back up data, from writing CDs or DVDs, to copying onto laptops or to external hard drives or to various forms of digital "wallets," that function as image viewers as well as storage devices. With so many choices, you can bet that there’s a huge range of opinion in what is the best way to store and back up data, and we would question whether there is, indeed, one best way. But we can share with you our method, which has proven both economical and effective.

Before we continue, however, let me offer some advice about digital wallets such as the wonderful Epson P-3000 and Epson P-5000, or the Jobo models. These wallets range in price from about $450 for the Epson P-3000 with 40 GB of storage and $700 for the Epson P-5000 with 80 GB of storage, to around $850 for the Jobo Giga Vu Pro model with 120 GB of storage. These digital wallets work wonderfully for downloading images, offer an ultra-fine 4-inch diagonal screen for viewing and work with RAW and jpg files. And, because they weigh one pound or less, they’re very easy to carry. But remember, you cannot go on a trip with only one digital viewer to store all of your images. If you do, you will not have a backup of those files, unless you do not reuse your CF cards. You’ll either need another digital wallet or a second portable storage device to actually back up the files you downloaded from your CF cards to the first device. Luckily, you don’t need a device with a viewer for this backup—you can use any device that will store data. Such devices are considerably less expensive than digital wallets. You should be able to get find one with about 120 GB of storage for under $400.

	Most computers have a PCM CIA slot, or card bus adapter, as a card reading device.These download fast, but make sure you buy a USB 2 device for speed in downloading. A word of caution—your computer should have a slot but probably will not have the card bus adapter. You’ll need to buy that separately.

For example, let’s assume you use a Jobo 120 GB Giga Vu Pro model to as your primary storage device when "dumping" images from your CF cards. For your backup drives—the devices used to copy files from your primary storage device—you use two Jobo Giga Ones, with 80 GB and 40 GB respectively. These three units constitute a primary and a backup storage of 120 GB and cost about $1,200. For this example, we've gone with a large amount of storage (120 GB) for good reason—on an Antarctica trip you can’t risk running out of storage space. There’s no alternative if you do, other than attempting to delete files, which is time consuming and potentially risky since the viewers on these devices may not allow you to accurately evalute the sharpness of your images. In order to truly determine sharpness, you view images at 100%. Some digital wallets allow you to zoom in on a RAW file to check for sharpness, but the procedure is tedious.

For your primary storage, we recommend a device with a viewer so you can actually see the images contained on the drive. Not only is it fun to see your images on the drive, it also provides visual confirmation that your image files actually were transferred from your CF card. Perhaps, the most important benefit of viewing your images on the devis is that doing so could reveal a problem with your camera—a terrible dust speck on the sensor, a bad shutter or a funky CF card—that needs to be addressed. Dust or specks on the sensor are a common nuisance, but chances are you won’t notice them when you looking at images on your camera’s relatively small LCD monitor. You're more likely to see dust on a storage device's viewer which are usually larger than a camera's monitor. At the very least, small dust spots will result in a lot of extra work latter when you have to remove with your image-editing software. If the blemish is in a bad place, like the center of the frame, the images may be unsalvageable. Catching dust in your storage device's viewer and addressing the problem before you shoot more images can be a big time saver.

	A basic, very portable digital setup includes a laptop with a 13 inch screen and at least one 250 GB hard drive.

We think the best solution for backing up your images is to carry a laptop computer and an external hard drive (HD). At many mega-carton stores like Sam’s, Staples or Best Buy, you can buy a small laptop with 80 GB of storage for under $900, and an external HDlike the 250 GB Lacie for around $200. That’s around the same cost as an Epson, Jobo or similar digital wallet device and an accessory drive. While it's true that a laptop and external HD will weigh more and take up more space than the other backup devices, there are distinct advantages to using them.

The primary advantage of the laptop/HD system is versatility. With a laptop we can truly edit our files via image-editings program such as Capture One, Photoshop, Aperture or Adobe Lightroom. We can begin the process of image organization, collating and transferring files into meaningful collections, assigning IPTC information and key words. In addition to working with images, we can use other programs on our laptop to write a journal on the trip or produce a slide show to share with others. None of this is possible with the digital wallets.

	Editing in the field is risky, unless you are editing off your computer with a good RAW program. You run the risk of deleting your sharpest images and keeping inferior ones if you simply rely on a jpg view.

Many laptops have smaller internal HDs—60–80 GB HDs are common—than digital wallets and external HDs. If your laptop’s hard drive fills up during you’re trip, you may be forced to delete some files to make room for new ones. Assuming you've backed up the files to an external HD before deleting them from your laptop, you've still violated the primary rule of backing up files—having at least two copies of each file. If your laptop's small internal HD might present a storage space issue, you may want to carry two external HDs so that your computer can be freed up for more images. This second external drive should have the same storage capacity as the first so you don't run into yet another situation where you run out of storage space! If you go this route, you'll want to backup files to both external HDs, one after the other. Once again, you have two copies—one copy on each HD.

	Backing up your files can’t be stressed enough. Carry along the equipment to make at least two copies of your digital files; cheap insurance for a trip of a lifetime.

If you're working with a laptop/HD backup system and are about to run out of storage space, another possible, albeit much less-desirable solution, is to do a "hard" edit of your images in the field. While this may gain you some storage space, practically speaking, it doesn’t work because you’ll find you simply don’t have the time to do a competent hard edit. Unless you tediously check for sharpness, you’ll always run the risk of keeping soft or out-of-focus images, and/or deleting sharp images.

The external hard drives we use are not, technically, "portable" hard drives with the rugged construction and rubberized coating typical of these units. However, we’ve never had a problem with our metal-framed hard drives and, with 250 GB of storage, we’ve never run out of space.

So, what route should you take? Here’s our recommendation.

If you have limited space and/or if you don’t want to carry a lot of weight, then the digital wallets are the best choice. Remember, you’ll need either two wallets (expensive!) or a wallet and another storage device to backup files from the wallet. With a wallet you’ll be able to view images and, with some models, even check RAW images for sharpness.

If you have room, take a laptop. You’ll have far more fun with it, if only because you'll have a better view of your images on its screen which will be at least twice the size of the largest viewers found on digital wallets. As an added bonus—and it's a big one—when you bring a laptop on an Antarctica cruise, you'll receive plenty of hands-on computer instruction from the trip leaders. When you're not out shooting, you can practice these newly-aquired skills and techniques and get immediate feedback from the leaders when you have questions.

One final way to backup your files is burning images to CDs or DVDs, though there are several problems with this method. You'd need a very large number of CDs to backup your images and, though DVDs offer several times the storage capacity of CDs, both media are susceptible to disk corruption. This makes CD and DVD backup unattractive to us.

Whichever method you choose, remember that you need to backup your images files. It's as simple as that.

All images Copyright © Joe and Mary Ann McDonald