I received an e-mail from a reader who was curious about my comment in my last "new Tablet" post that indicated I did not have a lot of heavy lifting to do to prepare for my new unit. He asked if I would elaborate on my backup and password management strategy as he too is about to migrate to a new system. Of course, I'm happy to oblige.

But first, an update on the new Gateway S7200 - it's on a UPS truck somewhere in Tennessee at the moment and winding its way across the country to me here in New Mexico. Delivery is scheduled for Monday - three days earlier than I had been promised by Gateway!

Now, on to the subject at hand. I maintain two, redundant backup systems for my Tablet PC - one at home and one at my office. At home, I have a Mirra Personal Server on the network which backs up all three of our family laptops in real time. The Mirra server is a joy to use because, once it's set up, there's not a thing I need to do to maintain the system. I don't have to nag my kids to back up their laptops and I've already used it on a couple of occasions when my son has tried the old "my laptop ate my homework" excuse.

At work, I have an Iomega external USB 2.0 hard drive connected to my port replicator and use their automatic backup software to make a mirror copy of both the My Documents folder and my Outlook PST files. The utility runs every couple of hours and takes only a few seconds to catch up with what I've added to the system. I've chosen not to have the software purge any files I delete from the Tablet as a safety precaution against overzealous folder cleaning. Both of these backups contain all of my software that's not CD-based as well which expedites a system build greatly.

I keep all of passwords, account information, and critical numbers in two locations on my system (both of which are backed up to the Mirra and USB hard drive natch). I use Splash ID on both the Tablet PC and my Treo 650 for always-available access to this critical information. I also store all of my software license information in an encrypted and password protected ClipMate database which makes fresh installs a piece of cake. I simply unlock my vault, select the license key I need, and, when prompted by the application I'm reinstalling, paste the information. ClipMate's Power Paste feature allows me to handle those registration screen with multiple fields easily by sequentially pasting each line of data into the appropriate field.

That's the short version of my strategy. It's been refined over a number of different PCs and system rebuilds and it works really well. I can build out my system in a single day with time left over for some blogging and e-mail.