We had a ton of stuff we wanted to do today, but the hard drive on our Linux computer went bad. We had almost everything backed up, but I decided we ought to take this opportunity to get out backup situation a little better under control. Troy has been talking about what he is going to do in terms of archiving stuff. We bought a computer online from Dell, then ran down to Staples to buy a terabyte external drive to perform backups. Then, while I worked on the program I owe to my buddies in Oregon, Christian, archived all the stuff we had on our old backup drive to the new one, consolidated two smaller drives onto a single drive so he could use the other one as a replacement for the one that went bad, and installed Linux Mint onto the computer that previously had the bad drive. In the meantime, Lorena found a table on sale and bought that. So now we have a new computer table for the living room, a new setup for Lorena to browse Facebook and for me to administer the homeschool, a much better disk backup plan, and a new computer to look forward to bringing on line a two or three weeks.
I am going to revamp the homeschool system later this weekend, too. I have a much better plan going forward now that the kids have finished with the ACT. I have been looking into the local community college catalogs, trying to figure out what is the best program and classes for them to take so I can figure out which CLEP tests would be the most appropriate.
That happened to the first computer I had with Ububuntu 7.10 installed on it. The computer happened to be my really old office computer with a ten year old hard drive. The funny thing about that computer was that it worked about three times faster after installing the Linux OS on it. Then one day it died. So after building a new computer with a quad core processor and so on, I went back to Frys and purchased a 1 Tb. external. It is a comfort to know that all my music, photos and work documents are safe. As far as my laptop is concerned, I back up everything on my laptop to a 16 Gb. flash. Good luck with the new computer. The Mint sounds interesting. I will have to look into it. Take care, Adam.
Ken & Christian,
I am back home and online! The Ubuntu upgrade is churning through right now. Maybe this I’m experiencing the “this car really corners well now that I got an oil change” phenomenon, but the fan doesn’t seem to be running on this thing as much as it was.
Adam: Your situation pretty much mirrors ours. We are starting to take a new approach to archiving, just like you. In addition, Troy gave us a great idea on the photo thing. His plan is to just get a new flash card for his camera whenever the old one fills up. He will erase the images he does not really want, but just leave all the other ones on the card and use it as one of three archive places. He will also have the download to his main computer and (I laugh) he also but the 1Tb. external yesterday. Same brand, same place as us! Great minds think alike. We actually spent a WONDERFUL evening with Troy and his wife Youngin last night installing Ubuntu on his computer!!
That very well could be true. Is it churning at all? The processor is probably not working as hard with Ubuntu as it was with XP. We had a blast last night and are only sorry we did not have the install disk already downloaded for you. We are excited to hear about your “user experience.”