Last week I met some young travellers at the local beach who had lost several week's worth of holiday photographs .
They had attached their laptop to an "al fresco" power point and left it unattended long enough for someone to steal it. Of course, they felt the loss of the irreplaceable photos more than the loss of the laptop itself. I felt for them, because 15 years ago I also made a stupid mistake - I left a bag containing sixteen rolls of exposed but undeveloped 35mm film in the boot (trunk) of a taxicab in a remote city in China.

There are other ways of losing your pics, not all of them involving stupid mistakes like these.

Here are some steps you can take to minimise the loss from such catastrophes.

#1. Keep a diary - a picture may be worth a thousand words but a thousand words is better than nothing.

#2. Set up some shared cloud storage with your friends/relatives.
DropBox, Ubuntu One, SkyDrive and other apps allow you upwards of 2GiB of free storage, and you can purchase extra (DropBox will allow you an extra free 250MB for every friend that accepts your invitation to register, up to a max of 16GiB. I think Ubuntu One and SkyDrive might be offering 5Gib or more free storage).
Just drop your photos as you download them from your camera into a DropBox subfolder that you have shared with a friend back home. DropBox will automatically synchronise these with your friend's DropBox, and your friend can move them to a safe repository (the USB drive you have left with him, perhaps), freeing up the DropBox for your next set of pix.

#3. To avoid the temptation to use a public power outlet, you can buy an inverter that will convert your car's cigarette lighter to allow you to charge your laptop using the normal AC plug or USB.

Do others have some similar tips?.

CDs/DVDs are cheap, light and easy to carry, backup images to them. There is a good chance you can do that even if you don't have your own computer with you.

There is also Google Drive and iCloud, but EO is right about upload speeds. Most cameras now use SD cards and you can get the micro versions with 8GB and more pretty inexpensively. I usually buy two 8GB cards instead of one 16GB just to diversify. (cards today are very reliable).

The trick is not to keep the cards near your camera, lose one, lose both. That's the advantage of the micro cards. They're easier to eat than a camera and that is one of the all time great, if terrible, safety methods.

Depending on your photos and trip, you could also consider mailing some of the cards home on a regular basis.