5 Ways How To Back Up Your Travel Photos While Abroad

How can I Backup Travel Photos securely whilst on holiday? I compare several practical options for backing up travel photos on the move.

I looked at several options before travelling and found that my preferred method didn't work that well, a high-tech solution was unreliable, and the old-fashioned method worked the best! Here is what I found testing various options for backing up travel photos on the go.

Backup Travel Photos with Multiple Cards

Although we sometimes think of them as part of the camera, the memory cards in your camera are removable storage devices. If you can't follow through on the backup options below, consider travelling with multiple memory cards and using one per day of your trip to keep any data loss to a minimum. That way, if you lose one, you won't lose every photo from your trip.

Backup Travel Photos using WiFi Syncing to Phone

If your camera supports WiFi Syncing, you can download all your photos to your mobile phone using the connection application and then upload them to one of the many Cloud Storage Providers. My Canon 80d was simply a case of downloading the Canon Connect application, enabling WiFi on the camera, connecting my phone to the camera's WiFi and downloading all the images. I then used Google Photos to back up to the cloud.

Backup Travel Photos using iPad/iPhone and SD Card reader

This option would be the best, use the least equipment, and be the cheapest. The idea was to use the Apple SD Card to Lightning cable to copy photos from the SD Card to the Cloud over WiFi. This tutorial uses my iPhone, but the method is the same for any iPad or Mac running iOS 10+, and a similar method can be followed for Android mobile phones and tablets.

The airline does not allow me to take my laptop, and it's too large and heavy to travel with anyway. I still need a way to back up my photos from my SD cards to a hard drive or, better yet, the cloud. That way, I can be sure that my photos will be safe in cloud storage if anything happens to my SD cards, camera, or phone.

I'm using the Lightning to SD Card adapter sold by Apple. Other products may exist. Android users can get a USB OTG (On The Go) adapter and plug in a memory card reader.

You can then import the photos from the SD Card to your iPhone or iPad Photo application, and from there, use the Apple iCloud or Google Drive applications to sync photos to the cloud when you get back to the hotel or find a wireless hotspot, or using your 4G connection if you have the data allowance.

This method works quite well, but unfortunately, I cannot upload the photo directly from the SD Card on my Apple iPhone; the photo must first be imported into the phone's storage. This can be a problem if your phone does not have as much storage space as mine. You can break this into batches depending on how many photos you have to import. The import process will allow you to delete photos from the SD card once they are imported, saving re-importing images that have already been added; however, this increases the risk of photo loss.

Uploading one day's worth of photos to the cloud (around 30GB!) took too long; it took nearly three days. This isn't a good option for many photos; you can forget to upload a video. Theoretically, it should sync, but I could never upload a complete video; it would always time out after uploading 60-70%. Due to either a timeout or incorrectly reporting a successful import, I lost a few incomplete videos when I downloaded them from the cloud. Good job, it was just a test.

Backup Travel Photos using WD My Passport Wireless Pro

The next option I tried was the WD My Passport Wireless Pro, a portable hard drive that can stream media to mobile devices like iPhones and iPads. It can also be a cost-effective option for backing up photos while travelling. The drive features a built-in SD card reader that allows photos to be copied directly from the card to the hard drive without using a computer.

Insert an SD card into the reader and press the button to begin the copy process. You can also wirelessly connect mobile phones and tablets to view photos and monitor the copy process.

If that wasn't enough reason to buy one, it also features a built-in 6400mha power bank, which powers the drive on the go and can be used to charge phones and tablets.

My strategy will be to use lots of low-capacity SD Cards, probably one per day. Import each SD card to the hard drive and store that SD card safely. This allows me to have two copies of my photos; one I'll keep on my person, and the other will be kept safely in the hotel room.

There are only two downsides I can see with this device. One is the hideous USB3 cable that is provided. It is only 30cm long, so plugging it into a wall outlet involves moving furniture around or finding something to prop the device on while charging. Longer replacement cables are available but quite expensive.

Secondly, the device is unsupported in Linux, so I have to spool up my old Windows installation to transfer files off the drive.

Unfortunately, the unit I ordered was delivered faulty, and the replacement did not arrive in time for my holiday, so I've not been able to test this in the field yet. I shall update once I have given it a complete test. Update: The replacement unit failed after eight months; WD won't repair it under warranty, so unfortunately, I can no longer recommend this product.

Backup Travel Photos using Android Tablet and USB Hard Drive

The final option I tried, and the one I will take on holiday, is my old Android tablet, the Asus Transformer Prime T201. I've had this for several years, the past few in a box in the cupboard since I upgraded to an iPad. I was recently reminded that the tablet features a full-size SD Card reader and USB sockets, so I wondered if I could use this tablet to copy files from the SD Card directly to a 2.5" laptop hard drive in a USB caddy. I had all the parts I needed to connect a 250GB laptop hard drive to an old SATA USB controller. Surprisingly, Android detected it as a USB Mass Storage Device and mounted it as a partition for me. Next, I inserted my SD card, and low and behold, a simple drag and drop was all needed to transfer the photos to the hard drive.

Keeping a copy on the hard drive and a copy on the SD card, one per day or two, should provide enough data redundancy to avoid losing photos. I'll have to be careful not to throw the hard drive in my bag, but this should be a good solution.

Before leaving home, ensure you have enough storage to handle all your photos by clearing out space on your cloud service and transferring and deleting old photos from a portable drive.

Do you have any tips for backing up photos in the field? Have you used the Lightning SD card readers? I'd love to hear your tips as well! Please share in the comments below.