abmj-jr

It depends on how important the shoot is. When traveling for myself, I dump images to my laptop and external drive each night and then reformat the cards. When there is money involved, either for-pay or on spec, or when I can't take my laptop/HDD, I do the things above plus keep the images on the cards, which go in another "used" card wallet until I get home and can copy to my desktop/HDD stack. That means I need at least a card per day of shooting plus a few extras, but memory is cheap these days - at least as long as I am not out for more than 10 days or so. I've only ever gotten close to running out once and even then didn't need the extra card I bought in Hokkaido.

I admit to being a bit of a belt-and suspenders type of guy.

It all sounds like a lot, but it is a lot better than hauling a couple dozen rolls of film up the sides of mountains like in the old (very old) days.

CPRich

Yes, I have a fairly well defined workflow with naming conventions, including date, location, subjects, etc. But I don't erase the card until I need to. Despite hourly backups to both an external drive and cloud-based storage...just in case. There's just some finality about formatting a card, even knowing it's stored in at least 3 places, sometimes 5. YMMV.

chucko

This site http://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/ tests cards in fairly recent DSLRs and mirrorless bodies. Also card readers; even though both of my laptops have built-in card readers, an outboard USB 3.0 reader will save you a ton of time offloading images from a card.

I tend to carry a lot of cards while traveling, and swap them out frequently to avoid having all my eggs in one basket. Sooner or later, a card will fail and you don't want to lose all of your images.

If you use and like Lexar cards, stock up now. Micron just announced it is discontinuing the line and exiting the retail market.

Loren Pechtel

Useful information as I'm looking at a replacement camera and that means more modern cards also.