Having acquired an external hard drive (borrowed for free from a very kind housemate), I was able to do a full Time Machine backup, which I left running overnight.
Then, this morning I started up the Snow Leopard installer, used Disk Utility to wipe the hard disk and set it to use the GUID partition table, and then installed Snow Leopard. If you're interested, I opted to install Rosetta but unticked the extra printers, languages and QuickTime 7, saving me around 2 GB of disk space. The install took around 25 minutes, which isn't bad.
After a reboot, and the flashy welcome animation, the installer asked me if I wanted to transfer files and settings from my Time Machine backup. This is where I am up to as it's around 30 minutes into copying the data back, and I'm now off to work. Apart from the faff with wiping the disk, the whole process has been very painless and I'm impressed that it was able to pull my documents, settings and applications out of the Time Machine backup without needing to restore everything.
Obviously the proof of the pudding will be when the installation is finished later on.
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