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As a landscape photographer traveling to places with average to poor WiFi signals in the hotel/motel, the first time I tried to use the cloud I very quickly realized it was an exercise in futility. A single RAW file is 76MB, and a day’s shoot can easily result in anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred captures. Uploading a single file took forever, and I quickly calculated that uploading a day’s shooting was impossible even if I left the process running all night. So the cloud is simply not a viable option for backup when traveling.

The alternative is making copies – plenty of copies. So my current process is to first copy images from memory card to laptop, then from laptop to two thumb drives. When I leave home, I bring two small padded envelopes, pre-addressed and stamped with sufficient postage. At the end of the trip, after verifying that the files on the two thumb drives exactly match the files on the laptop hard drive, I seal one thumb drive in each envelope and mail each one to my home address – from separate post offices in different towns. So I have everything on my laptop, on the plane with me, and two other copies in the mail in case something happens to the laptop. I’ve never had to use the thumb drives, but knowing they are in the mail is a nice security blanket. BTW, I used to burn to DVD instead of thumb drives but DVDs are much heavier to mail and slower to write, and I decided that having two thumb drives was sufficient security, and WAY more convenient.

Based on my experience with machines that have been running too hot, either from high ambient temps or lack of cleaning, I would expect a hard drive failure sooner rather than later. I would strongly suggest that you do a prophylactic replacement of the drives, one at a time, before they fail (as they surely will). You can use a drive imaging tool to clone the old drive to the new one, making it easy to swap in each new drive.

You also would benefit from a utility that monitors various internal temps and shows an alarm if they get too high.