Paranoid backup strategies are hard to push too far. When I'm home, I backup (not regularly enough) via Time Machine to an external drive that lives in a safe. Every now and then I take that drive, move it off-site, buy a larger one and use that until the cycle repeats.

For casual travel with smaller cameras, like a Panny GH2, I load every card onto an iPad and then lock the cards and keep them in separate luggage from my iPad until I get home. Oh, and I send 'really can't lose' images to the cloud whilst on the road, at the highest resolution that local bandwidth allows.

But for serious photo travel or assignment, especially with today's increasingly large files... I have a new solution and I really like it.

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The Macbook Pro Retina has no Firewire, thereby obsoleting a whole drawer full of portable drives. But the Seagate GoFlex FreeAgent (what a stupid, long name) has a great feature: it comes with USB2 and FW800 adaptors and for a few extra quid you can buy a tiny, light, 'docking station' jobbie that turns it into a Thunderbolt drive.

That means you can backup on the road, but transfer that backup to your legacy non-thunderbolt desktop system (Mac Pro in my case, with two lovely huge monitors and stuffed full of RAM).

Now this is never gonna be as fast as an external SSD: the 500 and 750GB versions are 7200 RPM and the 1TB version is 5400RPM (unconfirmed: Seagate's site is not very helpful but I am sure I chose the smaller drive because in store, the package of the larger drive said 5400).

I bought the 500gig version and over both Thunderbolt and FW 800 it is really fast, especially when out on the road where speed matters more.

How fast?

I took a 41.4GB LR folder containing a catalogue, all photos and all other associated files and sub-folders and transferred it from the 2.7ghz Macbook Pro Retina to the drive over thunderbolt. This took 7 min 3sec. Then from the drive over FW800 to my Mac Pro 2.8ghz quad core. This took  11 min 3 sec.

This thing weighs around 255 grammes with the Thunderbolt adaptor. It measures 4 x 2 x 1 inches. It costs a LOT less than an SSD.

Love it.