Remember, you need a back-up download also. That is, two duplicate downloads in case one of them fails. You're not going to trust all your great photos to just one gizmo, are you? I don't need to tell again my story about a laptop that had hot coffee spilled on it, do I? At that time I had an Archos 320 as another back-up. Now I use the Archos and a PD70X.
"8 million cords and chargers" is about right. Last trip my bag of back-up HDs, chargers, cords and spare batteries was as large and heavy as the camera bag :-) No kidding.
regards - tom

Considering how inexpensive cf and sd cards have become, your backup can be simply to have more of those. I travelled with a couple of 2 gig cf cards and a couple of 1 gig cards. since I only accumulated 8 gigs of photos, then most of them were backed up right on the cards.

I used my Ipod almost every day! Easy to charge when we were there.

Drew