I got tired of carrying a laptop around so I get a smaller laptop. You sound like you would do well with that idea, but maybe it takes the form of an external

I got tired of carrying a laptop around so I get a smaller laptop. You sound like you would do well with that idea, but maybe it takes the form of an external (e.g. USB) storage device that you store virtual machines on but don't forget about backups. Perhaps you have a script snapshot and rsync diffs between your storage and your machine so that each machine's local storage can also be your backup.