Travelling with just a T2i and an iPad 2?

[Geckotek]

Ok, I'm about to take a 3 week trip to Asia and I'm debating not bringing my laptop. I have a Canon T2i and a 16GB iPad 2 with the camera kit.

The biggest challenge I can think of is storage of my photos. I'm thinking I could unload them to the iPad and perhaps use the iPad to upload to the cloud?? During at least 5 days of my trip in NK I assume I'll have no access to the internet so this may prove to be an issue. I haven't even tried the first solution to know if it's viable...do I lose quality or metadata during the upload?

There are a couple of other options I can think of:

Buy several more SD cards
Buy one of those new wireless external drives ($200...ouch!)

What do you guys think? I am price sensitive because I am trying to save every dollar I can before the trip.

 

[Gav2k]

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Sd cards. That's the best way!

 

[Ruahrc]

Ideally you'd have both. Bring enough SD card storage to hold all your photos, as well as a backup method so you have 2 copies of your photos. Best practice is to keep one set of photos on your body at all times, so incase someone steals your luggage/backpack/whatever, you at least have a set of the pictures on you. This is probably doable with a few SD cards in a pocket.

It all really depends on how much you intend to shoot. Will you accumulate more than 16GB (less whatever you already store on your iPad) of pics? If so, then you don't really have a choice as you'll need to bring extra storage. Uploading to the cloud may not be a practical solution unless you intend on sitting in an internet cafe for hours on end uploading pics. The internet infrastructure in asia is pretty good but I don't know what kind of speeds you can expect to get in publicly available internet kiosks.

IMHO the safest bet is to bring your laptop and a USB HD. Back up the photos to both the Laptop and the USB HD, as well as keeping as many on SD cards as you can.

 

[Geckotek]

Thanks for the advice. Good points. I may have to seriously debate bringing my laptop. Insurance for this trip sounds like a better and better idea every day as well.

I'll be looking for some extra SDHC cards on Slickdeals....but if you guys have suggestions I'd love to hear them.

 

[MrMacMini]

I know you said your try to budget yourself, but you may want to consider one of these (no laptop needed):

http://www.hypershop.com/HyperDrive-s/119.htm

Ill be traveling a lot this year for work, Japan next week, then Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and all of Central America and Ill be getting a hyper drive, use my iPad 2 for editing and sharing, and I wont have to carry my laptop with me!

 

[rusty2192]

Thanks for the advice. Good points. I may have to seriously debate bringing my laptop. Insurance for this trip sounds like a better and better idea every day as well.

I'll be looking for some extra SDHC cards on Slickdeals....but if you guys have suggestions I'd love to hear them.

For SD cards, I have a few Transcend class 10 cards. You can get them from Amazon for dirt cheap with free Super Saver Shipping. They cost less than $15 per 8 GB and come in 8, 16, and 32 GB varieties. I have 3 or 4 8 GB and one 16 GB and have not had any problems.

http://www.amazon.com/Transcend-Cla...KNEG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310508915&sr=8-1

 

[fitshaced]

I know you said your try to budget yourself, but you may want to consider one of these (no laptop needed):

http://www.hypershop.com/HyperDrive-s/119.htm

Ill be traveling a lot this year for work, Japan next week, then Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and all of Central America and Ill be getting a hyper drive, use my iPad 2 for editing and sharing, and I wont have to carry my laptop with me!

I had no idea these things existed and will definitely be looking into getting one. Sorry for bringing the thread off topic a bit but, if I have VLC on my ipad, can I use one of these drives to move movies to the ipad and play them via vlc? I think this would seriously upgrade the ipad importance for me if it did.

 

[And1ss]

OP, I had a similar dilemma when I went to China. I left the mbp at home and just brought the iPad but I had about 30gig of sd cards. Luckily, I never had to backup to the iPad, but you could consider getting one of those photo data dump hard drives.

 

[Keleko]

On my recent trip to Michigan I had my laptop for backup purposes. I was also fairly aggressive about deleting shots I didn't like from my SD cards. I also used the iPad for most of my photo processing from the raws. It worked pretty well most of the time. So if you have some sort of backup system for the originals, the iPad will work just fine.