Round The World Tickets
Thumb drives are a RTW traveler’s best friend
While many people will continue to debate whether or not you should bring a laptop computer with you on your RTW trip, I think it’s pretty clear that everyone should be bringing at least one USB Flash drive, also known as a “thumb drive,” with them. If you aren’t yet aware of what these things do, they are extremely small solid-state storage drives that are very durable and very cheap.
They can hold as much as 32 gigabytes of data, although those are still quite expensive as of this writing. The 2 and 4 GB sizes are the most popular as of now. You just insert this tiny thumb-shaped thing into a USB slot on any computer, and the thing will appear on the desktop as another hard drive. There are no moving parts so they are very durable, and they get their power from the USB connection itself, so you never have to worry about plugs or power converters.
Backing up photos
The most obvious use for them is to constantly be able to back up your photos and/or video while on the road. Unless you are an experienced photographer, you’ll probably want to take digital photos in one of the compressed formats that will make each file about 1 MB in size. Now that 4 GB flash drives are cheap and common, that means you could fit about 4,000 photos on one of them. In the United States we’ve started seeing 4 GB models for around $20, and 8 GB models for about $30-40, at least on the cheap end of things. If I were leaving on a RTW trip soon I’d bring at least 2 of the large-storage ones, even if I were also bringing a laptop.
It’s a good idea to upload your photos to Flickr or another service as yet another backup system while on the road, because these things are probably fairly easy to lose, especially for those who lose things often in their regular lives. But having two flash drives will mean you can easily and quickly back up your entire collection from one to the other from time to time, and store one of them inside a compartment in your pack while you keep the other handy. Believe me, the photos of your trip will be worth a fortune to you in the years following your trip, and losing a chunk of them would be a major disaster.
Other uses for thumb drives
In addition to photos or videos, you can keep Word documents on these things, and with those you can be creative. You can keep a backup of your contact list of people you meet while on the road, so if you lose those sheets of paper or business cards you’ll have it all in one place. You could scan your passport and other identification and keep the files disguised as something else on your thumb drive. If you meet someone with a really good album you’d like to get, just hand them your thumb drive and ask them to copy it on to it for you. You might share an album you think they’d like in return.
Where to buy them
If you happen to lose one along the way or you just want to buy another to store more stuff, you should be able to buy them just about anywhere at this point. If you are starting in the US or Canada it’s probably best to buy them before you leave because things like this are more expensive in Europe and pretty much the rest of the world as well. Some people assume that in Hong Kong or Singapore or Bangkok they’ll be able to buy cheaper electronics, but that’s not usually the case. You can buy bootleg movies and software on the street in those places, but actual electronics tend to be strangely expensive, especially considered they are all made in that region in the first place.
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