Thanks everyone for your replies. I am very cautious with backups and on recent trips over the past few years I have traveled with multiple portable hard drives and have one in my hand luggage, one in my wife's hand luggage and another in our checked luggage. I always transfer from the still camera memory cards and the video camera hard drive every night and then back up to the portable drives each night as well.
I think I will buy a netbook but since we won't be traveling until July I'll wait a few months and see what new models may be released. I won't be using it for photo editing while I'm traveling - just for transferring photos and video each day and backing up, as well as email and web browsing.
I do
tons of photography while traveling, and my current setup is:
HP Netbook
250GB External/Travel Hard Drive
4x 16GB SD cards
I normally never take more than 100GB of photos on trips, so it usually works out that I only need to empty about 2 cards during the trip. However, I save all the cards to the external hard drive at the end of every day. Additionally, I upload JPGS of all the files to my Picasa page. Even though they aren't as easy to edit with, and they are scaled down, god forbid anything did happen, I would at least have backups.
Plus, taking a netbook works wonders. I don't take plugs for charging my phone, iPod, etc...I just bring the USB cords and use the Netbook as a hub for all my electronics.