I had some anxiety about my image safety during my vacation. Just before I left, the hard drive on my Macbook Pro was scrambled and I rebuilt it from a Time Machine backup the evening before leaving. I then couldn’t find the external hard drive / card reader that I bought a few years ago.
I just downloaded images from cards onto the laptop during the trip, reviewing and then erasing the cards. A single copy of all of those images until yesterday when they were copied over to external drives, consolidated into the big Aperture library, and put into vaults.