That's what it's all about

Today is another day, so of course there is another Hokey Cokey post.

( First, the results )

bookwormsarah wanted to know why I cared. I just saw a reference to the Hokey Pokey on someone else's LJ yesterday and was struck by yet another (seemingly trivial) unexpected cultural difference. This was the kind of thing I found hardest when I was in the US. Big things that were different were expected and you could get used to them. But to suddenly find, halfway through the hokey cokey that everyone else was doing it differently? That's something you're never prepared for. You think you're all doing the same thing, until you're not. You think you're all following the same conversation, until suddenly you realise you're talking completely past each other. It gets quite wearing. And although, over time, it happened less often, it never completely went away and so I never completely relaxed. There's always something else to trip you up.

It's good to be home again.

External hard drives and backup software

At the moment, my dissertation work is stored on the hard drive of the laptop and at Mozy. Completed sections are also held by my supervisor (and will be sent to the second supervisor as well). Notes and bibliographical information are at present only on my computer and at Mozy. I like Mozy a lot. It's free and automatic and has worked excellently when I've needed to retrieve things. If you don't currently do any backing up, I would definitely recommend it. But I'm not sure I want to put all my eggs into its basket, especially as the dissertation progresses.

Also, my laptop only has 50GB of space on the hard drive. Which is basically okay. I don't store lots of images, music or other large files on it. But it would be nice to clean it up a bit and move some of the things I really don't need easy access to out of the way.

So, I'm looking for a cheap, reliable, not necessarily vast in terms of space, external hard drive. And also for some good, reliable, cheap software which will do the automatic backing up of files.

Anyone?

ETA: Have now found this:

which looks like it might do the job (and is very pretty).