I write all my adventures on my computer.  I collect photos of gear, people, vehicles — anything to aid in setting the mood on games, be it faces for people’s character sheets (I find it helps people get into the feel of their character), to what your gun/car/spaceship looks like.  There’s PDF versions of game books.  Everything the GM needs to run a game.

But sometimes it’s simply impractical to bring all your crap with you.  Or someone steals your laptop.  Or you spill coffee in it.  Or the hard drive crashes catastrophically with much gnashing of teeth and Shakespearean drama.

At a time like that it’s nice to have backed up your data.  It’s also nice to be able to just bring everything you need with you in a pocket and use someone’s laptop at the game session (oh, come on — someone’s gonna have one!)  Hence my plug for memory sticks.

I bought a SanDisk 32gb Ultra Backup.  It’s about the size of a stick of gum (but thick — about as thick as my cell phone.)  Doesn’t matter what brand; I’m not shilling for one type or the other.  But 32gb!  I have everything from my writing, to my games stuff, to pictures and music on this thing.  And I still have space.  It’s more than enough that I could travel with this, plug it in to whatever machine I can lay my hands on, and either work, game, or what have you.

If you work with a nonstandard word processor, like I do (WordPerfect…it integrates pictures better than most word processors [although, to be fair, Word 2007 does a good job]) a stick this size has enough memory you could probably drop programs you need onto it, if you know the machine you’ll be using doesn’t have it.

I highly recommend one of these high-storage sticks or even a small external hard drive for the GM on the go.