HomeServer saves my bacon, but not without some pain
When I got home last night, I fired up one of my spare laptops, copied the HomeServer restore CD ISO image onto it and then created a new Virtual PC 2007 VM. Booting into the restore process worked fine, but for some reason the VM kept losing its network connection during the restore. After 3 attempts, I moved to the main server and repeated the process – a few hours of restore later and I’ve got my “laptop” now running inside a VM along with all data up to a week ago 
I’m impressed with the fact that the VM just booted without any issues even though the underlying hardware is quite different. I was expecting to need to use Safe Mode to change the storage driver – but nope, Vista just booted, I logged on and off I went.
What I didn’t mention last night is that all the confidential data on the laptop was encrypted using EFS. I did look at using BitLocker back in March but it was too much hassle when the machine is already installed. When I get a replacement Laptop I’ll install it with BitLocker from day 1 so I don’t need to worry about encrypting certain folders..