IN THE POCKET

Dick Pountain/Wed 12 May 2004/3:41 pm/Idealog 118

I'm writing this column from Italy where Spring is in full spate, albeit rather wetter than usual. This is fine with the locals who last year had a serious drought - and it's OK by me because it's restored my well-water to pristine clarity (I could sell it as posh mineral water if I had some fancy blue bottles). I've had the usual scattering of IT-related problems, the first of which was wildly fluctuating bandwidth from my local GRIC PoP in Arezzo. Most times I get 3,000-3,5000cps but for over a week the line would choke to an unusable 250cps after a few minutes connection - it's back to normal now but I never did fathom the cause. It coincided with the onslaught of Sasser virus though - I wonder if perhaps GRIC guest customers get the thin end of the bandwidth when the going gets tough (I may be doing them a disservice).

The other problem was that my trusty HP810 portable CD burner expired, and I rely entirely on it for data backup when away from London. I went into Citta di Castello to the Euronics computer store to check out the price of USB thumb drives, only to discover that all they had were for USB 2.0 while my ageing HP laptop only has USB 1. But as I gazed gloomily into the display cabinet, it dawned on me that I already have a USB storage device in the shape of my Sony Clie's Memory Stick.

I told the story here last month of how I failed to purchase a new laptop due to an attack of Acute Consumer Phobic Disorder, but what I failed to mention in that column is that I awarded myself a consolation prize by picking up a new Clie TJ27 to replace my trusty monochrome TJ10. That purchase was a little marketing lesson in itself. Despite all my reservations about battery life on colour PDAs with rechargeable batteries, I'd already decided I could no longer avoid colour, partly for readability and partly to write my PDA Poker program for a colour display.

My first preference would have been a Palm Tungsten E, but the very day I went down Tottenham Court Road I'd read editor Tim Danton's PC Pro review of the new Sony Clie TJ27. Tim had given it an 'above-average-but-not-outstanding' verdict, so I went in to handle one. I liked the screen quality and the price, was unmoved by the built-in digital camera, but what swung me was that I already owned a 128MByte Memory Stick - hence I could save myself 40-odd quid (for a new SD card if I bought a Tungsten) and a lot of hassle when porting my working environment from the old TJ10. The proliferation of proprietory storage formats is no accident - they tie you into your brand, and it worked on me by causing me to buy my second-preference machine.

However once I'd got it home I fell in love with the TJ27. I was surprised to find myself using its built-in camera all the time - because I take my PDA with me everywhere, unlike my 'grown-up' camera. The camera only has 640x480 resolution, but either the hardware or the interpolation firmware causes its images to degrade in a non-blocky, dithery sort of way that lends them a most attractive impressionist or pointillist quality. I now understand why there exist arty photographic cults - particularly in New York - of certain cheap Russian cameras that generate a similar romantic fuzz. What's more, Sony gave it an excellent user interface: sliding a single switch opens the lens-cover, switches on the PDA and puts it into the camera app so you just have to tap the screen to take. It fulfills exactly the same note-taking role people used to use Polaroids for, and I've even on occasion used it to snap a page of text from a book.

So there I stood in Euronics, realizing that not only was the Clie now my visual diary, but also my vital data bank too. My 128MBbyte stick is less than half full, so I can take over 60Mbytes of current work - writing, source code and the like - with me whenever I leave the house. Sony supplies an excellent utility called Data Import that makes the Memory Stick appear in My Computer as a normal Windows drive, so I can drag-and-drop the files and folders I need. It won't replace CD-R (or a DVD-RW when I do plump for a new laptop) for full backups, but it gives that crucial psychological assurance that all the effort you've just put in is safe from hard-disk failure or burglary. It's also made me wonder whether a 1Gigabyte Compact Flash card might be a good first-level backup solution in my next laptop.

We've been writing a lot about backup solutions in recent issues of PC Pro, but the sermon bears repeating: backing up is not optional, and it's always more complicated than you think. Understand clearly the threats against which you're backing up, which are, in order of severity: accidental deletion or corruption of individual files (restore from network or local disk copy); total hard-disk failure (restore from full backup set on server, tape or CD); theft or destruction of computer (ditto); burning down of house/office (restore from a full backup set stored off-site); collapse of Western civilisation (forget the stupid data).