[ubuntu-uk] getting help - UK List

[Alan Pope]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 02:38:11PM +0000, baza wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 14:30 +0000, alan c wrote:
> > London School of Puppetry wrote:
> > > Hi Jonathan, I agree but I think the problem is wider than just us isn't 
> > > it....I'm concerned that non-groupy types....like most of the ordinary 
> > > world should be able to access Ubuntu and other OSS
> > > and know that there is exactly the same expert support available as 
> > > there is for Windows etc. Caroline
> > 
> 
> > I give phone support (free) if asked, for local contacts.  I am not 
> > any expert!
> > 
> > When I began with linux a few years ago, I was experienced with online 
> > use getting help, but found my local LUG of limited value for a number 
> > of reasons. I like the idea of very local help. Experience to date 
> > suggests that it is only the very initial questions that need answers, 
> > reassurance included.
> 
> The best advice anyone can give, IMHO, is to burn your 'home' directory
> to CD or DVD every month, that way if you system does the big firework
> you can reinstall and keep (most) of you data.
> 

Heh, that might not be quite so easy for many people.

alan at wopr:~$ du -hs .
100G 

Maybe time to get one of those new fangled HD-DVD or BD burners ;)

Alternatively you could use a nice backup tool such as SBackup [0] or HuBackup [1] to selectively backup the stuff that is important 
like documents, photos and email, skipping the less important stuff (and bulky stuff) like games (which can be re-installed) or (in my 
case) qemu/virtualbox virtual machine images:-

alan at wopr:~/vm$ du -hs .
53G 

Cheers,
Al.

[0] http://sbackup.sourceforge.net/ScreenShots
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HomeUserBackup