My hard-disk started emitting a highly irritating whine today. I panicked and decided to back up my stuff. Windows XP Professional? Hardly. It took me several minutes of disbelief and some googling before I could accept that this supposedly flagship OS can’t back up to CD-R. Oh no, you have to back up to a file, then burn it onto the CD manually. Not great if the reason for the backup is because you’re afraid that your HD is dodgy.

On a related note, there seems to be a dearth of affordable consumer backup products. Most tape drives appear to be aimed at the server market, and seem to cost as much as two hard disks. Might as well buy the second disk and a RAID controller card (in my case its built in to the motherboard already) and use RAID 1 mirroring instead it seems. That way you don’t have to remember to do backups.