Eric Brackenbury wrote:
I think some of the comments about just saving data and then rebuild
the OS are a little bit inconsiderate of total newbies like myself.
Not very encouraging to for people to in fact use Linux OS.
Well, I consider myself to me an eternal Linux newbie. The approach
that I use to backup home computers is as described above - save the
data, and replace the operating system if necessary. The few times this
has happened the replaced operating system was not the same as the lost
one - the new one was a different distribution of Linux with more recent
releases of tools. In fact, I find the churn in the operating system
area to be so fast that this is the only approach that is reasonable for
me. Essentially every six months I feel like I have a complete new
system running here - so much has changed. To illustrate this I was
using one distribution of Linux that I really liked, but the person who
was maintaining it died. A couple of months later all support ended.
So I had to change distributions. This was a good time to replace the
hardware too for me - might as well deal with all the pain in one
interval. This email is being typed on the new machine. My personal
financial data is here too in Quicken files that I moved forward.
I guess what I am trying to say is there are lots of different
situations that one has to recover from. I find the data saving and OS
replacement strategy works for me. I also use two computers at home,
with my essential data copied to both. Another factor is the amount of
data - I only have a few hundred files at most to worry about,
everything fits on a single 2GB memory stick, and copying from one
machine to the other only takes a few minutes. If I had a lot more data
I would have to use a more elaborate approach.
--
Randal Leavitt - another Ubuntu user
http://positiveenergy.blogspot.com/
http://www.simpy.com/user/randalleavitt/links
http://tinyurl.com/hgvmg