Doc had his laptop stolen. This is something that I worry about all of the time. However, I think that I have things set so that I wouldn't skip a beat if my laptop was gone. All of my files are shared between many programs using My Documents redirection. This server that these files are stored on is maintained by the MS IT department and is backed up by them. I use offline files to cache those files locally when I'm not connected. On top of that I checked the checkbox (it is that easy) to make my offline files encrypted. That way I don't worry about someone getting ahold of trade secrets either.

In fact, I recently just upgraded the hard drive on my laptop (to a sweet 60GB) and did a reinstall while I was at it. No problems and no data lost.

I now store the local time and GMT with each entry. This seems to me to be the right way to do this. The RSS feed is always GMT, but really, when you read a weblog, you want to know the local time when that was written. It really puts it in context.

This means that the entries on my weblog before the 5th are in PST and those after the 5th are in MST. I wish there were standard ways to name timezones but that all seems a little tricky.

With my current solution I can still keep all of my data in day based XML files. I'm just clear that an entry gets slotted into a particular file based on the local time when it was written.