What’s in your bag….

I have seen many a post recently that dives into the IT professionals bag and divulges the secret travelling tech products or just the cant leave without amenities. I decided to jump on this and let you know what I carry around in my bag.

The Bag

I have a choice of two and this really depends where I am heading, if I am heading out for a conference I prefer a backpack, easier to march around airports and conference centres with a backpack but if I am rocking a suit or have a particular customer meeting then I would probably go for the messenger bag.

The Machine

Since my Professional Services days where I carried a 15″ MacBook Pro specced to the nines allowing me to run remote labs and give me enough power to do anything whilst onsite I have downsized to a smaller MacBook Pro 13″

Enough spec to run everything I need as a Systems Engineer and now a Technical Marketing Engineer, everything I need really conveys to, Outlook and PowerPoint and the odd requirement for remote desktop.

Tech Amenities

Power bank – this is not a inherited or acquired one from a tech show as they just do not really have the power, this is a full blown unit giving me about 4-5 charges on my phone but also the ability to charge other devices I sometimes carry such as iPad or my Kindle Fire. Depending on where I travel I do have some more pocket friendly units that can give me just enough top up. It’s a whopping 20000mAh and take a look it was very cheap.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00NGK9HN2/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Head Phones – I have my beloved Beats by Dre regardless of where I am heading and what bag I am taking I will always have these in hand they are coming up to nearly 4 years old now so its about time I looked at some newer shinier ones but the replacements will follow me everywhere.

Although mine do not look like this anymore.

Lightening cables – my MacBook has an embedded HDMi but not all screens out and about have that capability still yet so I am always armed with my two VGA adapters.. Why 2? Because if one fails and you are to present then you best be able to have a backup plan before the witch hunt starts on the Mac guy. I also carry a lightening network adapter, to be honest since getting this I think I have used it once. Its much easier to tether or find an open Wifi for connectivity.

PowerPoint clicker – Much the same as the VGA adapter if you don’t have your clicker and no access to one for a presentation it really throws me off so always keep one in my bag and always a couple of spare batteries for it.

Charging cables – I have recently moved over from a OnePlus One to the new HTC 10 and in doing so this means a change of all of my charging cables from mini USB to USB-C. I also have my iPad which is a 2 shame on me but still using that old Apple charger and then my kindle fire so I like to make sure I have one of each of these plus maybe one of those handly little multi cable chargers.

Passport  –  I also carry a 1TB western digital passport purely for backups, as I am aware that the public cloud offerings from OneDrive, DropBox are not a form of backup as I will touch on in an upcoming ransomware post. So although very handy and great for syncing my work data between my travelling laptop and home docked macbook pro its not going to protect me if a corruption occurs and replicates around my data. I also have another Western Digital Passport at home hooked into the docked machine running scheduled backups. Some might say that I am very protective of my data and I guess so but given who I work for if I was to lose data it would look really bad. Plus your data is important protect it as much as possible… things happen.

On top of all that above I will also have a lot of small bits I always carry, I carry a small pair of earbud headphones ideal for remote calls and WebEx sessions, a notebook and pen when you just need to write something down. I also carry a stylus for my iPad, sometimes when on a customer site or giving remote sessions an iPad is the next best thing to an old fashioned whiteboard. I try as well to always have a few Veeam branded USB drives with the latest ISOs and documentation on or just plain empty ones that I can use for various tasks.

That’s really it, I find these posts really interesting so would love to see more out there so take 20 minutes and jot down what you have in your bag.