I for one do back up all the keeper shots from my digital cards to either cd or my hard drive, at some point, so I can free up the card space.

But if traveling, it might also be fun to send chosen pics to a processing site and have them waiting in the mail when you get home. Haven't done that, but I can imgaine doing so. Back in the film day I would process some of my pics while traveling, so film wouldn't suffer extra passes through xray.

<<< So, what do you suggest? Burn a CD? What if that breaks too? Burn 2 CD copies? What if you lose them on the train? How about burning 5 copies and put one in each luggage of yours? >>>

2 copies, one you keep the other you send home.

Good evening and thanks for all the great advise and also for the locations in Amsterdam, hetismij, thanks a lot.
Just so happens my son gave me a 2gb card for Mother's Day-guess I won't worry about burning them onto a cd, we'll see.
Leslie

Leslie, you mean all this time we could have been talking about missing passports and lines at the Vatican??!! Shoot!
Have fun with that big ol' card. (I have several 256 cards so instead of now buying a larger one I tell myself that it's "better" to split my pics up on several cards. Just in case. In case of what, I'm not sure, but I humor myself.) Happy Mom's Day!

In case of what?

Theft. Loss. Accident. Being Tasered.

Smaller is better (sometimes).

The answer to your original question (although you may no longer need it, others might)is yes, in Paris you can easily find photo shops (photoservice, Kodak,Fuji...)where you can burn onto a CD from your memory card.Some supermarkets (Carrefour, Monoprix...) have the terminals also.

What a thoughtful son to buy you a large memory card! Now you don't have to worry about your pics.

I do agree with other posters that it is still comforting to have some other backup- especially if it's pics of a "once in a lifetime" shot, trip or event. On line photo back-up is handy, I use Yahoo Photo - it's free, large storage,no expiry. Not all internet places will let you put your CD/DVD into their computer - they are worried about viruses (depends on the country).

My friend had her camera stolen the day before she returned from a month in Costa Rica! :(

Thanks, travelite, that is the answer I needed, I am with you, I like a backup so I would like to unload them onto a cd-thnaks again, less than 2 weeks, I can hardly wait
Leslie

As others have mentioned, I find it useful to travel with a laptop (although for many more reasons than just photography).

I also travel with at least two, 2GB cards for my camera, and download the photos onto my hard drive each evening. (If traveling with other people, I'll often burn them a CD at the same time.)

I usually leave the photos on the memory card, too, since I have plenty of memory available, and don't delete until I've returned home and backed everything up on a second hard drive.

If you really want to preserve them, though, I think DVDs are superior to CDs for long-term storage, and would try to have them downloaded in that format, if possible.

I bought the Wolverine Flash Pac 7008 at Frys for about $80 on sale. It reads 7 formats of cards ( CF, SD Xd etc) onto an 80 GB portable hard drive the size of an Ipod. It has an internal rechargeable battery and operates on 120 or 240v. You can upload you cards and download all the files at the end of your trip.

I recently bought a 1 gig flashdrive for $15. That will be my chip backup next time. Internet cafes can be found in or near most train stations so I'll use their computers. No need to lug a laptop around Europe.

Here's 2gb for $7:http://www.ecost.com/ecost/shop/detail.asp?DPNo=4565546

With good resolution mini movies available on most digital cameras, a 1GB flashdrive won't hold much.

That depends entirely on 1) your definition of "good resolution," and 2) your definition of "much."

Most people probably make way more movies than they should anyway. I limit mine to something highly dynamic, such as a ride on the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal, or the "floating rock" sculpture in Füssen - so I typically don't end up with more than a few hundred mb from a 2-week trip.

Best advice, take lots of memory, more than you think you need. A few years ago I thought I had plenty of memory cards but turns out I didn't. I take my pictures at very high resolution and with a few days still to go on our trip, I ran out of memory. We went into a store to buy more memory but were astounded at the price, double what we would have paid at home. However, they had the CD burning service, and for a few dollars all was right in the world again. This was before 1G cards were common-place.

On a side note...

I was thinking about taking a laptop on this year's trip to view/backup etc. However, I came across a product that I hope will be better for travelling. It's an Archos 704 personal media player. It's got an 80G hard drive, I can download my pictures to it and view them on the 7" screen. It also plays movies and music, so will entertain me on the plane/train without taking nearly as much space as a laptop. Unfortunately it had to go back to the manufacturer to fix a problem so I can't really give a very good review of it yet. :(

Oh, great. A backup drive that failed out of the box.

<i>Bonne chance!</i>

Actually, it worked fine on its own, but it had problems with the touch-screen not responding when it was put into its DVR station. But yeah, we'll see if they can fix the issue before making any final judgments.

Always backup your photos. Having a CD burned is fast &amp; practical.

There's no way in the world I would rely on those cheap &quot;ecost&quot; cards. Notice that the cards from SanDisk &amp; Lexar are considerably more. There's a reason for it...they're far more reliable.

I'm sure many of you are doing fine using them, but you're gambling with you're photos.

All of the cities you list will have many places to burn CDs for you.

Shoot at the cameras highest resolution for the best pics.

Have fun!

Lots of travel photos here: http://www.jimtardio.com

&quot;Notice that the cards from SanDisk &amp; Lexar are considerably more. There's a reason for it...&quot;

Yeah, there is: their marketing budgets are huge.

In fact, all camera memory cards are made in a handful of factories, and they're all about equally prone to failure.

During a trip to Greece last year, my companion burned CDs from memory card, as we underestimated usage.

A lot of the &quot;meta-data&quot; on the CD seemed to have been stripped away. This is the hidden data in each file that tells the PC software such things as the shoot date, exposure, etc.

This was quite a nuisance to sort out, after returning from our trip.

We used 3 separate photo shops during the trip, and each shop had this &quot;problem&quot; - it wasn't limited to any one shop.

For this reason alone, I'd strongly urge to bring along sufficient extra memory cards from home.

The european memory card prices are substantially higher han USA, and in Greece the selction was limited to mainly 128MB and 256MB cards.

As others have pointed out, the USA price for 2GB SD cards and 4GB CF cards are pretty cheap nowadays.

oops, posted to soon... wanted to add:

Even with large memory cards, I'd still burn an occasional DVD disc for emergency backup use, in case camera is stolen, falls overboard, etc.

One of the photoshops we visited had trouble splitting up contents of a 1GB card to multiple CDs, so went to another shop that burned DVDs ... much more convenient.