On the Second Day of Kit-Mas: 3M Dual Lock Fasteners
Living out of suitcases and a camera bag means that I have become a relentless optimizer. Every pocket, every ounce, every single workflow tweak matters when you’re juggling gear across continents, managing terabytes of image files, and working from airplane tray tables, hotel desks, and the tailgates of whatever vehicle I happen to be in at the time. Over the years, I have accumulated a mental catalog of products that simply make life on the road a little bit better. They’re small solutions to persistent problems that most people never think about until something goes awry.
For Day 2 of my 12 Days of Kitmas series, where I am sharing some of those unglamorous, but invaluable, pieces of my photo kit. What I’m sharing today is hardly what I would call super sexy, but it might save you from the photographer’s nightmare scenario: a corrupted or damage hard drive full of irreplaceable files.
Allow me to introduce you to 3M Dual Lock fasteners.
I see all types of solutions for keeping external hard drives and card readers nicely mounted out of the way while people are working on their laptops, but I’ve also seen many of them fail.
For years, the standard solution was Velcro. It worked, sort of. But Velcro has issues. It attracts link like a magnet and holds onto it stubbornly, for one. But more critically, it weakens over time, becoming softer and less secure with every open and close cycle. I saw the consequences of this during a flight when I watched a colleague’s external drive detach from its Velcro mount during light turbulence and go careening down the aisle of our airplane. That sickening thud of a hard drive is a sound that no photographer ever wants to hear. A damaged drive doesn’t just mean lost equipment; it means potentially lost images, irreplaceable moments from once-in-a-lifetime trips, and work you can never recreate.
That’s why I use the 3M Dual Lock fasteners and have relied on them for nearly a decade now.
Instead of Velcro’s hook-and-loop system, Dual Lock uses interlocking mushroom-shaped plastic stems that snap together with an audible click. You actually hear and feel the secure connection. The fasteners can be open and closed up to 1,000 times before losing 50% of their tensile strength, putting the lifespan of Velcro to shame.
Originally designed for industrial applications like securing signage on buses, trains, and ships, Dual Lock includes vibration-dampening properties that offer an extra layer of protection for sensitive electronics like hard drives.
The practical advantages are immediate. Dual Lock doesn’t collect link like Velcro does. It’s not nearly as weak as the flimsy magnet systems that come with card readers, and you only need a small square of it on your drive and the back of your laptop unlike the larger “sleeves” that I’ve seen recently popping up, too.
After almost a decade of mounting drives (and not just small SSDs, but my old rugged LaCie brick-sized hard drives with the orange rubber, too!), card readers, and other dongles with this system — over hundreds of thousands of miles on flights, road trips and working in situations that are less-than-ideal, I have yet to have a single failure.
I’ve linked to it here in my Amazon store (where I do a get small kickback for the referral at no extra cost to you), but you can find it locally in the big box home improvement stores, too. You can get it in rolls or pre-cut strips and it comes in a handful of different strengths. I use the Type 250 version (meaning 250 mushroom stems per square inch), which is more than sufficient for this application.
It’s one of those small things that removes worry from my workflow, and that peace of mind is well worth the few dollars it costs.