The more I travel, the lighter my bag gets and the days of what if and maybe I’ll need are basically gone. Now I can fit everything I need into a 50L Marmot Duffel for trips around a week, and have never had an issue using it as a carry-on. Longer trips or ones where I won’t have access to doing laundry I’ll use a Deuter 65L Travel Backpack that can easily be checked. I’m still a late packer, often doing it just hours before leaving and never using a list. This leads to the first of my issues, and fortunately the one that brings me the least pain.
On my recent trip to Iceland I went laptop free, which meant I’d have no way to dump images as memory cards filled up. Having 128GB card and two 64GB cards might sound like enough, but as previously mentioned my anticipation was some long time-lapse setups through the 18+ hours of darkness. This meant adding more storage in the form of memory cards.