When you travel often, your luggage is your best friend. You want it to be always here for you.
Two main schools: suitcase vs. backpack
Suitcase: advantage, it rolls ? Disadvantage, more bulky to move around. You can enter a museum with a backpack, not a suitcase. If you travel in less developed countries, where there are no walkways and the roads are stony and full of potholes, rolling is not really an option. It can also only be used for traveling, and not for your daily activities.
Backpack: main advantage, it goes everywhere, and, if wisely chosen, can be used in your daily activities. Disadvantage, you have to carry it on your back. It becomes powerful when you have reduced your packing list to around 10kg on travel days.
I prefer backpacks, but in the end this is a personal choice.
Here are some good options in both the backpack category.
Backpacks
In the last few years, digital nomad dedicated backpacks have started to emerge. Companies like Minaal or Tortuga have run successful Kickstarter campaigns and commercialized great bags. Some bags by companies more geared towards hiking also make bags suited for digital nomads, and in particular Osprey.
So, what are the key criteria to choose your bag?
Reasonably light (ideally less than 1kg, have to be less than 2kg).
Durable (ultra-light bags are light, but are fragile too. You want your bag to survive years of travel on the road, and it might end up with chickens in the back of a truck or in the rain on a ferry to cross the Mediterranean…
Facilitate organization:
Front-loading
Suitcase
When we travel, we don’t use suitcase, they are just difficult to move around. In a lot of countries, you will not be allowed / able to keep it with you in the bus or minibus, and in most cases you don’t want them to get out of your sight.
Moving from country to country on a slow travel rhythm, we however found ourselves buying again and again some items of equipment. It takes energy and time to find the right items, so we decided to add one luggage in those cases. For this, we use a suitcase that we check-in.
For suitcases, we strongly recommend Samsonite. Ours is 19 years old, has visited 50 countries and is still going strong. It now has quite some scars, but is still going strong. Models are then a matter of preference.