Protecting Your Memories on Your Next Big Adventure

Traveling! Adventure! Heading off to a completely new place and experiencing another culture is something that everybody should do as often as they are able. Learning about other cultures and climates and traditions helps you better understand and appreciate your own roots and background. And while we can’t yet travel around in time (sorry Tardis fans), if you budget wisely you might be able to travel almost everywhere.

Now, there is no doubting that the first person experience is unrepeatable. Even so, documenting your travels is almost as important as the travels themselves. After all, we all only have so much mental RAM. Eventually, memories start to blend and fade in and out of each other. Having journals and photos to read over and look at can help keep those experiences fresh and will make telling our friends and families about our adventures much easier to do.

How to Document Your Travel Adventures

In the days before smartphones and tablets, documenting travel adventures required carrying a bunch of heavy equipment with you everywhere. Blank books and notebooks, still photography cameras, different lenses, camcorders, etc. Then you had to pack everything very carefully to make sure that nothing was damaged on the journey home.

Thankfully, today you can carry your journal and cameras with you much easier. Every smartphone and tablet has a notetaking app and a built-in camera. You can download apps and buy small accessories to extend the capabilities of your device but gone are the days when you’d need an extra bag for all of your “recording equipment.”

Of course, you do still have to take steps to protect your notes, photos, etc. The best way to do this, say the experts at Secure Data Recovery, is to purchase a really good external hard drive and backup your photos and journals. In addition, it is also smart to backup your data in the cloud so that if something happens to your physical backup device, you won’t lose all of your great memories. Plus, this way you won’t have to worry about running out of hard drive space on your device!

Keeping Your Adventures Safe

In addition to protecting your digital files, it’s also important to protect the physical devices that keep them safe. Here are some of the ways that you can do that:

Install security software. This is especially important for Android devices and devices that run on open source operating systems. These systems are extremely vulnerable to hacking so you’ll want to make sure you have malware detection and thwarting software installed. It’s good to install it on Apple devices too, though those tend to be more secure.

Turn your device’s security settings all the way up. Regardless of how you feel about the fingerprint scanners personally, enabling the fingerprint to unlock your device is a must when you are traveling. It’s also good to set your device up to “brick” itself after too many wrong passwords are entered. And, of course, turning on the Find My Device feature is an absolute must.

Practice some simple common sense measures. For example, don’t carry your external storage device with you as you explore. Keep it locked away in your hotel room or at a friend’s house. If you’re staying in a shared hostel space, ask if they have a safe or somewhere that you can lock up your belongings securely.

While out exploring, make sure to never leave your belongings unattended–not even for a second. Don’t ask strangers to watch over them while you use the restroom. Be vigilant. Keep your device in an inner pocket in your bag and wear your bag across your body, not hanging off of one arm.

When You Get Home

When you get home, backup your backed up photos. This way you can clear off your portable external drive to use on your next trip! It also gives you some place secured to keep copies of whatever you’ve stored on the cloud.

It might also be worth it to you to purchase a second portable hard drive that you can label with the location and date of your adventure. That way your backups will be backed up (always a good idea) and it will make it simpler to share a single adventure with friends.

Finally, don’t forget to label your photos and journal entries with the date, time and exact location you recorded them! Add notes to your photos describing the content of the photo.

And when all of that is done, start planning your next trip!