I'm now using my Tablet PC as my main machine. A liberating and scary experience. Liberating because I always have the latest files with me at all times. Scary because if I drop or lose the thing they all go south with it. Therefore I've resolved to up my game with regard to backups. I thought that an external hard disk would make a useful device, so that I could just image the drive to the disk and then perform an incremental backup each night. You know, the kind of thing you should do anyway.

So today I went shopping for an external disk drive. Nothing particularly portable, but big would be nice. Ended up with a Freecom classic. Seems to work fine. Cost 110 quid for a 250 GB device. Hangs on the end of a USB cable, seems to go quite quick, and holds a huuuuuuge amount at a very reasonable cost. Hook that up with the Paragon imaging software that I got free on a magazine cover and we are in business. I still can't believe the price of the hard drive. That seems an inordinately large amount of storage, in a nice box with a cable and power supply, for very little money.  I've already slapped just about my entire picture library on the thing and it has hardly dented its free space. Overnight I'll image the Tablet and we will go from there.

The only problem is that, for completeness etc you should really test your restore process (I've known of places that found out their backups contained empty directories when they tried to recover from disaster). This means that I really should test the restore capability of the system I'm using. I've a great deal of respect for Paragon sofware (their Partition Manager works a treat) but even so it will be a scary moment (of course I'll have all the files somewhere else too...)