My recent workshops to Svalbard and then to New Zealand taught me a salutary lesson about taking sufficient storage space. Originally, I was going to Svalbard for 20 days, then back home before visiting Middlehurst in New Zealand for a fortnight or so. With the SAS pilot strike in Norway, I spent another 10 days in Svalbard before flying directly to Middlehurst. Storage was going to be an issue!

Generally, I find 1TB is sufficient for a shoot of two weeks. My laptop has a 2TB solid state drive, which after the system and app files, leaves me with 1.5TB to play with. If I'm processing videos (in 2k), I can just about get by, along with my Phase One and Fujifilm stills.

For back-up, I take a couple of 2TB drives. My backup regime is to keep all the files I can on the SD and CFexpress cards, for as long as I can, but invariably I need to recycle them. Before deleting anything from the cards, I ensure all my files are on my laptop hard drive plus on an external drive. And before I remove them from my laptop, I have them backed up to a second external drive - so two copies at a minimum while I'm travelling. And if I go out to a restaurant for dinner, one of the external drives goes with me in a pocket.

The external drives have been around 2TB, but after my last trip, I'm now upgrading them to 4TB based on recent experience! And upon my return to Australia, what should I find from SanDisk but a 4TB Extreme Pro Portable SSD to review. Yes, I'm a SanDisk Extreme Team Member and have been using their cards for over 20 years, but this will be my first external SSD from SanDisk.

What I like about the drive is that it's small and light, is claimed to handle drops of up to two metres, and is splash and dust proof too. Read/write speeds are up to 2000 MB/s and they come in 1, 2 and 4TB capacities. But as I've explained above, I think it will be 4TB for me going forwards!