I have a new external hard drive.  Jan is sort of back, but flaky, so I have been backing things up externally.  The external hard drive I had was named Francisco (after Goya, natch). It was a good drive...

Up until I kicked his cord and knocked him off the table onto the floor while he was copying something.  Oops.

Back to the drawing board -- having lost some data, I still have my long-term important documents. (As well as the problem of what to do about my music library, half of which requires authorization by iTunes, but the version of iTunes I can run on Jan is old enough you can't actually access the Music Store, and every time I try to authorize something, I get an error message.  Out of 1976 pieces of music, I can access all of 748.  Damn you, Apple.)

So, let me introduce you to Henri (as in Toulouse-Latrec).  He is a 500 GB iOmega Ego portable drive, with a rubber cover that hopefully will help protect him.  According to the salesman at Fry's, these guys are pretty sturdy.  The Rocket Scientist confirmed this by stating that this is the portable drive he uses in the field sometimes.*

So maybe Henri is in fact Pat-proof.  I sure hope so.  I'm tired of having to recopy whole disk drives.

* I didn't take any chances, though, given my recent lack of luck with anything computer related, and bought the extended warranty, which normally I wouldn't.