A few years ago, i'd be crying right now.
In fact i'd probably be curled into a fetal position, bemoaning my fate and cursing an angry god. As mentioned yesterday, somewhere in my system futzing last night, i managed to hammer my main systems partition table. i'm not sure who, exactly, deserves blame for that. It may have been Ubuntu, Wubi, XP, or the fact that during one of the multi-boots, i clicked on Vista. Fact is, somewhere along the line, the single large partition on my 380GB main drive decided it didn't want to play anymore and everything that was on that drive suddenly wasn't.
Mind you, it's not like i'm all that good at keeping backups of stuff. It's just that in many respects, i realized that i didn't need to.
Based on my own paranoia, i do most of my work on my systems out of a 2GB TrueCrypt volume. That holds my Mozilla profiles and various sensitive documents. There's a snapshot i take about once a month, so i'm going to be missing recent stuff, but nothing critical.
Even the recent stuff is recoverable because my mail and most of my "active" docs have copies living on the various machines i touch every day, like my dreamhost account, the garage server, and my laptop. Frankly, i could copy the 4 GB TrueCrypt volume off my laptop and be in better shape.
Combine that with my general mistrust of all the DRM crap. i rip and strip every track i've purchased, usually within a day or two of doing it. That means that my MP3 players are effectively a set of backups for my paid media. Crap like this just enforces how bloody genius i am for doing stuff like that.
Thanks to some sagely advice from Mookie, i think i've got a fairly good setup plotted out.
So what now? Well, since it's a Dual Core AMD64 box that XP barely took advantage of, and since XP has an execution date in a few months, i've built a 30GB partition for XP, and loading Ubuntu 8.04 on the rest. Most of the apps i use on a day-to-day basis run in any environment (including Xara now), or have reasonable equivalents that work well enough for me. Plus, i do most of my work in Unix, so it's about time i made the switch.
What's more, my laptop still runs XP so if i come across something that absolutely cannot run in anything other than Windows, i've got that and i can VNC into it.
Am i happy about the sudden forced move? No, not really. Do i miss the stuff that got blown up? Again, no, not really (i was going to post up something about how Windows never ever picks up it's toys after an upgrade and how i recovered 5GB by flushing out update files), but i'm not really bothered by the loss. More annoyed by it. i'm going to have to spend some time figuring out how to get drivers for some stuff (like the Hauppauge WinTV card i've got) but even that's not critical since i've got a replacement encoder in the Archos box. i figure 20 hours to install and update everything and i'll be back in business with nary a twitch.
Honestly, i'm not sure if i'm more bothered about what happened or that i'm not bothered by what happened.
Only time will tell if living under Ubuntu will be a good thing or not.
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