This week I had to attend a meeting in Sydney, so I decided to try out my backup system by taking along my spare laptop along rather than my main computer. The spare is smaller and lighter, and is therefore better for travelling, but I don’t normally use it, so wasn’t sure that it would have everything I needed. There was an initial glitch when I arrived at the meeting because I forgot the password I’d assigned to open the spare laptop. However, once I got over that problem, things worked reasonably smoothly. The backup system seems to be working effectively – I could access my email and my files, even if it wasn’t quite as straightforward as working on the main computer. Now I just have to make sure that the reverse system works, to get all the files I worked on at the meeting onto my main computer.