There are two extremes when using a computer these days: in the blue corner we have access everything remotely and in the red corner we have take everything with you. Most solutions appear at various levels of compromise between the two.

My recent attempts at “taking everything with you” are proving quite successful, albeit with one caveat. My 1TB hard drive may be suffering from hardware issues and require a re-format. It has led to several nasty messages from VMware workstation about not being able to write memory. This drive is the one that contains all my VMs. A means to back up the hard-drive is certainly required! Luckily it seems like a straightforward copy of the files works, but I have not tried to “restore” them yet.

After running chkdsk on the hard drive connected to the host, booting the VM caused Windows to run it’s own chkdsk on the C: drive. So far everything seems to be ok but regular backups will be continued!

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum I finished a remote access trial of  “gotomypc” http://www.gotomypc.co.uk/remote_access/remote_access. Very stable, performant and easy. The one drawback being cost. So I am about to try some other solutions. “logmein” is next on the list https://secure.logmein.com/. It’s free.