I'm in Long Island right now, getting ready to start a photography workshop for American Photo (one of their Mentor Series programs). And for the first time in a long time, I've left on a photo trip without an extra hard drive to backup my images.

One of the great advantages of digital photography is the ability to have as many perfect duplicates of an original image as you like. With film there was only one original, and every copy after that lost some quality. With digital, since the files are nothing more than 1's and 0's, you can have as many exact copies as you like. So the trick is to make sure you actually make those copies. My system at home does that automatically, but on the road I've always taken some type of external hard drive - USB, Firewire, iPod, etc. to backup my photos at the end of each day of shooting. Those days are over.

SanDisk has a USB stick called the Ultra Backup. No larger than most other thumb drives, it holds a whopping 64GB of data! To me that means several days' worth of heavy shooting of RAW files. In addition to the massive capacity, it comes with software that lets you identify certain files or folders you want it to backup, and then does that at just the push of a button.While the stick will work on both Windows and Mac, this particular feature only works on Windows right now, though SanDisk says it will have a Mac version of that software later this year.

If there's any downside, it's the price. It's expensive for storage, though I've seen it for as low as about $160. The savings in size and weight, though, are considerable, and there's the peace of mind factor. When working with computers you always have to remember that hard drives do crash (those tiny spinning platters can and do fail). And when traveling, computers can be stolen (and if your backup is in the computer bag, say "bye-bye" to it too). With one of these, you can have perfect duplicates of everything you've shot, can keep them in your pocket all day (and under your pillow at night if you like), and the device has no moving parts to crash. You can even carry it through scanners at airports.

I'm a big fan of devices that are smaller, lighter and make life easier. This new USB stick from SanDisk has earned a permanent spot in my pocket.