[matthew]

I arrived home last night, and haven't had a chance to go through everything yet, but I'm estimating that I shot about thirty gigs of photos in the three weeks that I was traveling.

I had one of my three new 4GB cards fail. My portable hard drive wasn't able to read all of the files on it, so I needed to take it out of service until I could get it to a computer with a card reader, which didn't happen during the trip. Fortunately I had enough memory that it was never really an issue (10 CF cards for 20+GB) but if I'd been traveling with only three or four, it could have been a serious problem.

I always kept two copies of each photo, one on the portable HDD (a Hyperdrive Space 40GB) and another either the original CF card or a DVD. The cards and DVDs traveled in my luggage, while the more fragile HDD came with me in my carry-on baggage. I wanted to make sure that I couldn't lose everything.

At this point, the cost of buying Compact Flash cards, using them once, and then throwing them out is more economical than shooting film and never getting it developed.