The Carry-On Tech Kit I've Rebuilt 11 Times

I've rebuilt my carry-on tech kit eleven times in four years. Not because I enjoy it — because every version had something in it that I carried around three continents and never once took out of the bag.

This is version eleven. It's the first one that's survived a full year without me wanting to change it, which either means I've finally got it right or I've stopped paying attention. Here's everything in it, what each item replaced, and the three things I removed entirely.

The three rules I ended up with

Every version got better only when I applied a constraint. These are the three that stuck:

• One item, one job — unless the second job is free. Multi-tools that do two things badly are worse than two things that work. The exception is when the second function costs no weight or space, which is rarer than marketing suggests.
• If it fails, can I replace it in a mid-sized city that afternoon? Anything that fails this test needs a backup. Anything that passes it doesn't. This one rule cut about a kilo.
• Everything charges from the same port. Not a preference. A rule. The single biggest quality-of-life change in four years was going all-USB-C and throwing away the drawer of adapters.

The current kit

Power

One 65W GaN charger with three ports, one 10,000mAh power bank with pass-through charging, and two cables — one 2m, one 20cm. That's it. The 2m cable exists because hotel and airport sockets are never where you need them, and it has saved me more discomfort than any other single item.

This replaced: a laptop brick, two phone chargers, a separate battery for the camera, and four cables of varying quality. The GaN charger alone removed about 400g.

Connectivity

Phone with a working eSIM, plus a physical SIM slot kept free. I've written about the actual cost math on eSIM versus local SIM — the short version is that I use eSIM for the first 48 hours and switch if I'm staying longer than a week.

I also carry a small travel router. This is the item most people tell me is unnecessary, and it's the one I'd replace first if it went missing. It turns one paid hotel connection into a private network for every device, handles captive portals once instead of six times, and means my laptop never touches an open network directly.

Storage and recovery

One 1TB SSD, encrypted, that gets a full backup weekly. One tiny USB key with a bootable recovery image and my critical documents, encrypted, kept in a different pocket from everything else.

The second item is a direct result of a laptop dying in Porto in 2023. Total cost of that lesson: three days, one very stressful evening, and about €80 of internet café time. The USB key costs €12.

Every genuinely good item in this bag exists because something went wrong once. That's not a nice narrative — it's just how the list got made.

Audio

Noise-cancelling over-ears, and a cheap pair of wired earbuds with a USB-C plug. The wired pair is for two situations: when the over-ears are charging, and on planes where I don't want to explain a Bluetooth adapter to anybody.

The small stuff that earns its place

• A universal adapter with a fuse. The unfused ones are a fire risk and I've seen one fail.
• Three cable ties. Weightless, endlessly useful.
• A microfibre cloth. Screens, glasses, camera lens.
• A folded A4 sheet with account recovery codes, printed, in a sealed envelope. Paper doesn't run out of battery.

The three things I stopped carrying

A tablet. For two years I carried one "for reading and light work". In practice, light work happened on the laptop and reading happened on my phone. It weighed 460g and got used maybe four times a year.

A dedicated camera. This one hurt, because the photos are genuinely better. But the camera I'd actually use is the one already in my pocket, and a body plus a lens is 900g of guilt. If I'm going somewhere specifically to take photographs, it comes. Otherwise it doesn't.

A second laptop charger. Classic redundancy theatre. A 65W charger is available in any mid-sized city inside an hour, which means it fails rule two and doesn't need a backup.

The bag itself

35 litres, no wheels, opens flat. Three details matter more than the brand: a laptop compartment that opens separately so you're not unpacking at security, a water bottle pocket that works when the bag is full, and a strap system you can actually carry for 40 minutes.

Wheels are the thing people argue with me about. My honest position: wheels are better on smooth surfaces and worse everywhere else, and "everywhere else" describes most of the places I've had to walk with a bag. If your travel is airport-to-hotel-by-taxi, get wheels. Mine isn't.

Where I still get it wrong

I overpack cables. I know the rule, I wrote the rule, and I still find a fourth cable in the bag most trips. I've stopped fighting it — it's 30g of irrationality and there are worse habits.

I also still carry the travel router through countries where I've never used it. Version twelve might fix that. Probably not.

The weight budget, item by item

People ask what the kit weighs more than any other question, so here is the whole thing with numbers. Total, including the bag: 6.4kg. That fits every carry-on allowance I've encountered except two budget carriers in Southeast Asia, where the limit is 7kg including your personal item and they do actually weigh it.

The interesting column is the third one. Roughly 900g of the savings came not from buying lighter versions of things but from buying one thing that did the job of several. The GaN charger alone is most of it.

What the table doesn't show: the tablet (460g) and camera body plus lens (900g) that used to be in here. Removing those two items did more than every other optimisation combined, and both removals took me about two years to commit to.

Four things that failed, and what they taught me

Kit lists are usually written as if nothing ever breaks. Here's what has actually failed on me since 2022.

A cheap unbranded USB-C cable, twice. Both times the failure was intermittent rather than total, which is much worse — I spent an evening in Tbilisi convinced my laptop's port had died. Now I carry two cables from brands I've had no trouble with, and I test a new cable at home before it goes in the bag.

An unfused travel adapter. It got hot enough to smell in a hostel in Kraków. I threw it away that night. Fused adapters cost about four euros more and this is the least sensible place in the entire kit to save money.

The laptop itself, in Porto, 2023. No warning, no boot, three days lost. Everything I now write about backups traces directly to that week: the encrypted SSD, the weekly restore test, and the €12 recovery USB that would have turned three days into about four hours.

Noise-cancelling headphones, battery degraded. Not a dramatic failure — they just quietly went from 25 hours to about 6 over two years, which I didn't notice until a long flight. The wired backup pair exists because of this, and it has been used more than I expected.

The pattern across all four: the failures weren't in the expensive items. They were in the cheap accessories and the assumptions. That's why rule two — can I replace this in a mid-sized city this afternoon — does more work than any brand recommendation could.

Questions I get about this

Found an error in this piece? Tell me — corrections get made in the open with a dated note, never a silent edit. The log is public.