This is a Public Service Announcement for all those folks without any backups of their laptops. Either burn some discs, or buy an external hard drive (they are pretty cheap now) and BACK UP YOUR DATA! Once before you leave, and once a day while taking pictures.
Then you will only lose what you've not backed up. When I bring along a laptop, I back up my pictures every evening onto discs.
As a wise man once said, trust your mother, but cut the cards.

I second that and I learned the hard way. Last year I spent 3 weeks doing site surveys in San Juan taking pictures of each site, 300 to 400 pics total. On the last day there my hard drive crashed, I had every thing but the pictures backed up on a jump drive but did not have the room for them. Since this was work related we were willing to spend the money to recover what I had lost but it couldn't be done. I'll have a one gig jump drive with me on the next trip.