I travel all the time and do my best not to lose data while doing so.  I keep my photos in at least two places while on the road/inflight - one copy in my MacBook Pro and another copy on a portable hard drive that I carry in a small "Dolphin" case (not sure the relationship, if any, there is with "Pelican Case").

Once home, I clone the data from the travel drive to a stay-at-home drive.  With data in three places, I confirm the data integrity between my laptop photos and those copied to the travel hard drive before I delete the photos from my laptop.  I use a program from the iTunes Store for the Mac descriptively called "Compare Folders."  What this does is compare the data copied between two folders.  The free version compares file names, but does not run a more time consuming "Checksum" to validate the actual copied data.  I ponied up the $4.99 for the full version so I could have the piece of mind knowing that the files were copied correctly.