I’ve used a few differnt methods for backus while on the road over the years. I had a D7000 that had dual SD slots, SDs are cheap so the easy solution was to carry a heap of cards. I then upgraded to the D800E and then the D810, which had an SD and a CF slot. I used the same method althogh the CF cards were a bit more pricey than the SDs.

Now that I have the D850 that uses XQD/CFE cards in combination with and SD card, that approach isn’t an option due to the high price of the XQD/CFE cards.

I have 6 XQD cards (I got them early on before CFE was released) but there’s no noticeable difference between them and the faster CFE cards, (the speed is limited by the camera, not the card), 5 of the 64gb ones and a single 120gb. Thats a lot of images but if I’m shooting startrails they fill up pretty quick.

I like to have no less than 2 copies of every image at any given time.

I have the XQD cards labelled 1 to 6. I have 18 SD cards labelled 1A, 1B, 1C, 2A, 2B, 2C etc.

I always shoot with the cards in backup mode, with a .NEF file written to both the XQD and SD card.

I carry a macbook Air and a couple of Samsung T5 1tb portable SSDs when I travel.

When I fill a card I copy the images over to the SSD using the Macbook. I flip the write protect on the SD card and move it to a designated comprtment in my camera bag. I now have 2 copies of the images, where possible I avoid storing them all in the same location. The SDs stay in the camera bag, the Mac and portable drive are either in the car or at a motel.

Ther XQD card will be formatted and reused once I’ve filled the other 5 XQDs.

Once I arrive home the images are transferred to an SSD on my main desktop machine, then copied to 2 external HDDs, one of those HDDs stays at home and the other is stored offsite.

At this point all cards can be reformatted ready for the next trip.

So far I have never had a corrupted image or a card failure, if it does happen I should be safe using this backup method.