On safari in Uganda my brother and I found ourselves on a photo and video binge that left our devices wanting. Cameras, camcorders and smart phones were all quickly filled and, with more than a week to go, we needed more storage.
My brother had brought along an old Windows laptop for when this happened and we backed everything up to that before clearing down ready for the next day. This machine was now the sole repository for several hundred “once in a lifetime” photos and videos.

Potholes? You don’t know what they mean until you’ve visited Kampala
Unfortunately Ugandan roads are anything but smooth and after a couple of days bouncing around in the back of the van we discovered to our horror that booting the PC gave us nothing but the blue screen of death! My brother is a great photographer but isn’t especially knowledgeable about computers and, while I could tell he was trying to stay calm, his repeated question about whether those pictures could be salvaged betrayed his concern.
As luck would have it I had a copy of Ubuntu on a thumb drive with me. I had brought this along to salvage an old laptop for a friend and this turned out to be just what we needed. Within minutes we had the PC up and running by booting from the thumb drive and I was able to easily figure that the hard drive on the laptop was failing, but it wasn’t dead yet. Much to my brother’s relief I was able to bring up the pictures we had backed up.
Now we needed another place to put the pictures before the drive gave up the ghost for good. Here I just plugged in my Nook HD with its 32gb micro SD card and it was an easy job to copy the pictures across to the card. Job done!
Once again Ubuntu saves the day, and it somehow seems fitting that it should rescue us in Africa.
Considering how little space a thumb drive with Ubuntu on it is I’m actually now thinking of making that a standard part of my packing list.
Ubuntu…don’t leave home without it!