So, I have a lovely laptop. I’ve been using it for almost a full year. Several months ago, the USB ports died. It got mailed to the company and came back with a new system board. Yesterday, the USB ports died again. It got sent to a local company and will hopefully come back tomorrow. Unfortunately, that means that although I’m not “computerless”, I am missing my machine.

Why? Because it was perfectly set up - weeks and months of tweaking everything just right. To the point where I feel crippled now with a default setup. I was able to back up some stuff before sending my machine away. I grabbed my Onfolio collections, an older backup of my Firefox settings, my EverNote database, the few most important projects that I’m currently working on. But it’s not blissful. What am I missing the most?

• I don’t have Outlook installed on this machine. Although my next actions, etc. are on my palm, it’s just not the same. I hate inputting a lot of information into the palm. This means that I’m not likely to actually add any new NAs until I get my machine back. I think I’ll just grab a piece of paper as a short term solution. I did think about installing an older version of Outlook on this machine, but I don’t have the syncing software with me, so I still won’t have the desktop and palm in sync. Besides, I wouldn’t have access to my customized views or my macros on this machine. It would take too much time to redo all of that work.
• I had to install Onfolio on this machine. No big deal, except that I cannot for the life of me get it to work with FireFox. Every time I try to install the FireFox extension, Onfolio tells me that FireFox is not installed properly. I’ve reinstalled FireFox several times, with no luck. This means that I need to use IE to work with Onfolio - annoying. On the plus side, once I sucked up the fact that I would need to use IE, I was able to read through my RSS feeds and catch up from last week. (As an aside, bringing in my feeds was very troublesome; I grabbed the My Feeds.cfs file from my machine, but that doesn’t actually contain the feed information - I should have exported my feeds to an OPML file before giving up my machine. Fortunately, I had experimented with Google’s Reader a couple of weeks ago and could get the addresses of my favourite feeds. I’m probably missing a couple, but I can catch up with them later.)
• Because I want to be able to use EverNote, I had to make sure that I had an older copy of FireFox (the clipper doesn’t work in 1.5). Alas, even though I installed version 1.4, (which should be the same version I have on my machine), I can’t get the backup to restore properly, which means all of my extensions, bookmarks, settings, can’t get brought into this version of FireFox. Funnily enough, installing 1.5 allows me to restore my settings, but then I can’t use the EN clipper. Sigh. Fortunately, I was able to rescue my bookmarks out of the backup and at least have an older copy of the bookmarks.
• I am so missing Access Manager, a program I use to keep track of my passwords. I know I have a running copy at home, but not where I currently am. It’s amazing how many logins and passwords I actually have! Some of them I remember, some have hints in my email, others I can’t remember at all. This is what I get for letting FireFox remember my passwords for me.

What am I happy with?

• I’m so happy that my primary email is GMail. It’s so portable. I don’t even notice that I’m not on my machine.
• It was painless to download EverNote and install it. My database is working fine on this machine. The EN clipper is working fine in FireFox (and Outlook).
• I use Outlook as my first line of GTD - fortunately I can still access the information from my Palm. My second line is EverNote - project support material plus miscellaneous odds and sods. My third line is a combination of Onfolio and OneNote. I’m able to retrieve my Onfolio information, which I probably won’t need in the next two days. I didn’t bother copying my OneNote databases, since that information is basically “deep” reference - I probably won’t miss it at all.
• My blog is all web-based. No problem adding posts.
• My reference pages are with Yahoo Geocities and I can access the source html files from the web. This is especially good since someone pointed out that the links to my EverNote Template page were broken. Fixed already. Not as nice as working with my Dreamweaver, but doable.

What have I learned? Although I have a great backup system (incremental backups go to a zip file which is synced to this machine every few days, I sync my laptop to my home machine every weekend, etc.), it’s not perfect. Sure, if I went home I could recreate my system right away, but I’m away from home right now, and don’t have access to a few things I want. Here’s a list of things I want to make sure get synced/backed up on a (more) regular basis:

• Outlook pst file
• FireFox bookmarks
• EverNote database
• Onfolio collections
• Onfolio feeds to OPML file
• some way of exporting my password information (or copying the appropriate files for reinstallation)

You may notice that I don’t really discuss any “doing” software. I can’t really code or experiment on this machine, not without installing more software - so my plan is not to work on that kind of stuff for the next couple of days. I do have access to Excel and Word if I need them. I don’t have access to my huge collection of pdfs, but that’s okay - I print the ones I plan on reading anyway, so I do have a pile of reading to go through. I’m especially pleased that EN is so easy to put on a new machine - it’s beautiful to be able to get that functionality back so quickly.