Dropbox - backing up your travel photos as you travel

It is some years ago now, but my house was burgled. They took my laptop and camera which had all my photos from a recent long trip though Asia.

I had lugged my laptop all though Asia without a problem, only to forget to draw the blinds in my flat in Lyneham, Canberra and have someone break in and steal it.

I lost probably half my photos which had no backups.

Now it's no doubt I was stupid and careless. You never know when you might lose your gear, so I should've had them backed up whilst I was traveling.

The truth is I'm not much of a photo taker. If I meet someone cool or if I'm at somewhere new, i might feel obliged to take a quick snap. But I very rarely even look at them afterwards. Most of my photos from past trips I've never looked at.

And I don't care about the perfect photo. Why bother? Just Google it. Someone with a much bigger camera than me, with much more knowledge about photography has already taken a photo of the same attraction.

Still it's a bummer to lose all your photos. Maybe it's just human to be nostalgic. Even though i never look at them, it's like losing your favourite childhood teddy bear. It's just good to know the photos are there if you need them as a memory trigger.

So with this in mind we thought we'd try dropbox to automatically backup photos onto the cloud while we travel. My wife, who is the main photographer, is using her phone as a camera so it's an elegant solution for her ( I have a point and click which I need to copy to my phone periodically making it less elegant).

It's easy.
1. Download the drop box app and turn on the automatic photo upload
2. Take photos
3. Wherever you have WiFi, it backs them up in the cloud in the background

Sounds great - it does everything for you. So does it work?

Well it does and it doesn't. Dropbox is not the problem. It's the infrastructure. It takes forever to upload pictures up and furthermore, my wife has the complete opposite attitude to photo taking than me. She takes photos of literally everything. Multiple photos. From different angles. Everything.

So really you need access to fast internet in your room so it can be done overnight. Unfortunately for most places we've stayed, the internet just hasn't been up to par. It's either been down, slow or very weak from our room.

And we've been in a range of different types of accommodation from hostels to hotels where they have a guy to open the elevator door for you. In big cities to remote farms.

Price doesn't seem correlated with internet speed. For most places wifi is an afterthought. So what ends up happening is you accumulate photos faster than you can upload them.

We've been in Brazil and Argentina, fairly developed countries so as we head into Bolivia and Peru it'll probably get worst.

Internet is always getting faster though (even in third world countries) and each time I travel it's amazing to see how new technology changes the way we travel. So I think right now it's not quite there yet (are least for south america) but in the coming years, cloud photo backup is likely to become the standard solution for most travelers.

If you have any opinions or questions about drop box let me know in the comments.