I have to recommend getting a DAW
basically because you get a lot more for the money, PCs are cheap right now, you can upgrade way cheaper and easier, and when you weigh in other costs (eg a CDR for a roland VS..$500, a CDR for a PC $69, try replacing the hard disk in a hard disk recorder, or sending a mini disk to a friend), amount of memory, ease of working and mixing down and effects and etc etc... not to mention you'll have a hard time uploading mp3s, checking e-mail and posting to forums and designing CD jackets and mixing video and writting up promo material and lyric sheets, burning various types of CDs and and and and and and...., The PC or MAC is a better investment by far for the dollar.
But of course, it does depend on exactly what you want to do, that is the first question.
finally... I find my desktop portable enough... South Florida to north of the Arctic circle.. yes I'm from Alaska, and I'm not there now (-40 about now). I record mostly live shows, takes no longer to set up than anything else if you are organized... in fact, I plan to rack mount it in a flight case and then, hey, plug and play! And I manage to keep my PC stable through gutting windows to a shell (ha) of its former self. Wsh my PARIS system would run on LINUX but you can't have everything. But I reccommend (though I haven't used) some sort of ghosting/image program for sure. The key perhaps is that I have multiple boot partitions, and the audio partition has a gutted windows with nothing on it except my audio software and hardware... a lot fewer conflicts that way.
but there is a lot of info on what I have and what I do on my website, just so I don't have to explain here...check the archive section for the DAW report or tour journals and I'll have the latest journal on the BB page finished soon (theres a half finished one up now).
peace
Folksinger
www.pan.com/folksinger