Portable External Hard Drive
Take your laptop, and portable external drives to download your images from your CF/SD cards after you complete your day and head back to your camp or lodge.
You can also hook your camera up directly to your laptop without taking the card out and using a CF card reader. Check your camera manual for the proper procedure on how to complete this task.
Bring at least a 1-TB (Terabyte) hard-drive…I suggest two…and make copies of all the images you shoot. After you have downloaded the images off your cards copy them over to your external hard drive. After this process is completed I will always reformat the CF card so it wipes all the data from the card. This basically will give you a fresh card to start the next days shoot.
I do not recommend bringing 20 CF/SD cards and hoping that the cards you bring will be enough storage. It’s very easy to shoot 300+ images or more just on one sighting and very easy to misplace or damage the cards.
Prior to departure If you book a trip with CAT we can personally discuss all this via a phone conversation so you better understand what is important to bring and what you can leave at home to lighten your load.
If you are in the market to buy a portable hard drive I suggest you check out B&H Photo and another gear source is Adorama.
There are many brands to choose from and I have always purchase Western Digital and have not had any issues with this brand.
Portable hard drives are cheap and your trip to Africa is not, so the purchase of one of these units is cheap insurance that you will come back with all your images intact.
