One of my colleagues recently had her hard drive crash and the desperate “help me!” email I received (and my mostly helpless reply) convinced me to back up my own files.
I haven’t made backups since January 30, 2004, and I decided this week might be a good time to do so. I tried to get rid of everything that was replaceable and managed to slim down to around 12 GB of essential material which fit on three DVDs consisting of photos, music, and documents.
Since everything was cleared out, it also became the perfect time to format the hard drive and do a fresh install. I’ve been dual-booting Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux for a while but decided to experiment this time and see if I could work primarily in Linux. So far, it’s been going well and the only program I haven’t found an alternative for is MS Money. I’m now investigating a couple of leads on good financial software and will see if I can go Microsoft free for everything but the newest games.
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