I used the Sawyer Mini for my recent two week section hike mostly for drinking water during the day along with Aquamira drops for treating larger amounts of water at camp. This worked reasonably well. However, I feel comfortable enough with the Sawyer Mini to make it my primary method of water treatment on my upcoming Colorado Trail thru hike.

Even though I plan to use the mini as my primary treatment method, I still want to take some sort of backup system in case the filter gets lost, destroyed, or if I allow it to freeze (unlikely but possible if I forget to put it in my sleeping bag at night).

My initial thought is to take along Aquamira as a backup. I have the AntigravityGear kit for repackaging Aquamira into a smaller container and the kit as a whole should weigh 1.2 ounces vs. the 3 ounces for the original AquaMira packaging. However, from my experience on the JMT with the kit, the drop sizes were inconsistent and I ended up using more than probably needed to be sure.

I recently came across a listing for Aquamira tablets which seem to weigh next to nothing and could be viable as a backup method. The downside seems to be the extended 4 hour waiting time but that's probably ok for a backup method. I'd probably need to take along enough tablets to treat 6-8 liters, and then put extra tablets in my bounce box.

As a backup for the mini, which backup method would you choose?