BostonPocketPC

Judie Lipsett over at GearDiary gave probably the best coverage of the Mobius conference and on her last day she had a MacBook Meltdown due to a hard drive crash and experienced the "White Screen of Death" from a DualBoot of Mac OSX and Windows XP. Luckily in Seattle there was an Apple Store (of course smaller than the new one that just opened in Boston.) Looking for a solution from the "Genius Bar" they offered a lesser hard drive as a fix or to have it sent in, which she opted to do. She then played her options to get a working replacement for her "Main Computer" and decided to get a new MacBook Air with the "option" to return it after 2 weeks. I wonder if she will end up keeping it. :)

So this is a common corundum for laptop users and falls back to the point of carrying 2 laptops (if you got them with you) or a backup in case of disaster. I had written an article on this a long time ago over at Lockergnome. Another option which I do when I travel for business and conferences besides carrying 2 laptops (they weigh under 6 lbs total with extended batteries), I carry an extra ghosted laptop hard drive of my main laptop, which isn't hard since I just switched it out to an SSD drive. I also have an image of my laptops on an external hard drive I carry with me as well as a copy on my Media Center/Home Server box at home in case I loose all my gear. I have been burned in the past with hotel staff dropping my bags, a person tripping over a power cord from someone else's laptop knocking mine onto the floor, a hard drive corruption of 'good' beta code, a corrupted XP partition - all of which I corrected in about a half-hours time due to having one failure a while ago that left me without my most useful tool, but I did get through the day with my Pocket PC and bluetooth keyboard at the time. :)

I am wondering what other people do while traveling for a mobile backup. I know some people use their mobile phones and services like SugarSync or LinkedIn to gain access to documents saved at work or home. I just hope they do have a mobile or even non-mobile backup strategy.