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After 7 months of living here, I finally have a computer set up in the basement to do basic utility things like burn DVDs and back up files:
The thing sitting on top of the tower case is my Sharp MM-20 laptop in its backup/configuration cradle:
When you turn the cradle on, the laptop's hard drive appears to the host computer like a USB storage device. It makes up for the fact that the MM-20 doesn't have an optical drive. During the process of pulling all the files off the laptop to be burned on disks, I was appalled to realized that I haven't really backed up in a year. That's really quite bad, I know better.
The machine I'm using to do the backups was one that I bought just before leaving Champaign, and so I'm running Knoppix on it. Knoppix is a Linux distribution that runs purely off of a CD. IN other words, you can run it on a machine without installing or altering the contents of the hard drives at all. There are things that I like to tweak about an installation and so it's unlikely that I'd ever go entirely to that for my desktop needs, but it comes loaded with almost all the software that you could think of to include, and so it's a really useful tool. When I've had an install fail for some reason, Knoppix enabled me to get back running without having to resort to going to a Windows machine and getting new install media set up. After pulling a year's worth of photos off my laptop hard drive, I burned them to DVD+R disks using their nifty graphical CD burner application:
So, the moral of the story today: back up often, and a Knoppix CD is a really great tool in a pinch...or any other time.