Hard disk of my main PC died. (R.I.P. , it was 7(!) years old, really good piece of hardware.) On the plus side, my excellent backup method (rsync script) had worked well, so I lost nothing.

I bought more than ten times bigger capacity hard disk and replaced the broken one. (I also bought new monitor, old one was stamp-sized compared to current cheap ones...)

Then I started to think, which in my case, is often grave error.

I was running Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) before crash. I thought, what the heck, now I have excuse to upgrade from perfectly functioning Maverick to newer version, Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal). So I did clean install of Natty.

That was a mistake.

Linux kernel has some new quirks, which wreak havoc with USB devices in my configuration. It took several long desperate hours to trying small changes and rebooting to find stable configuration. I did so many small changes that I can't even be sure which one was problem solver. Even now I have one USB hub that goes to sleep now and then, but luckily it's not often. I'm quite sure they will fix all this in the Linux kernel in time, but for now, I can work with this.

Then, I re-installed (almost) everything, which was time-consuming, but I got many nice new playthings also... Weird, I had to work a lot on Linux native things. Windows software under Wine worked just by copying from backup.

What I did after I got everything working? Yep, you guessed correctly, I got myself in another fine mess.

See, I know nothing of nVidia CUDA thingy, so of course I thought I want it to work. So I began reading how to install it, which is... well, confusing. I got it working, after all, and I *does* speed up my desktop and graphics. I even have some applications like 3D-Coat and Luxrender which actually use it, Blender's new Cycles engine probably will too... But. It was quite a journey again to get it working!

So here I am. A bit anxious to even work with system. Funny, I feel like I have built the machine from the ground up, although I have only scratched surface of the whole complexity.

In the end: I now have Gimp 2.7.3 working fine. I had previously 2.7.2. It's also a bit quicker on draw with CUDA. It's even easier to paint with bigger screen. So, after all, this was Gimp update story!

Bravo, I think.

I've sort of held off on taking these kinds of adventures because my patience has seemed to take a long vacation without me.

I do realize, that the day my laptop takes a leap off the hard drive cliff, I'll have some interesting and tough choices to make for its replacement.

Yeah; Meercat really stunk. Since I virtuallized and had a backup of Lynx, I quickly went back to that version and stayed until Narwhal. Actually went 64-bit Narwhal with no regrets. It's a new user interface (Unity; you can go back to the old if you don't like), but I like the new interface. I would definitely go Narwhal if you have to re-establish your Ubuntu OS. Again, Meercat was a mistake imo and glad they relatively quickly upped to Narwhal which is also a longterm release. And one more thing; if you do so, don't do it as an upgrade but do it as a full fledged new install (that goes for 32-bit if your system doesn't support 64-bit). Note that since Meercat, GIMP, by default, is not part of Ubuntu anymore, but it is easily installed. 2.6.11 is the current release by the way. Not thrilled since it broke PSPI (not for all PS compatible filters, but enough to anger me; lol), but Shellout definitely is my friend now.

Looks like this is geeks corner!!

My wife's HD died and i had a little portable, which unknown to me had died too. We lost all of her data, her poetry, her writing, her pics our banking info, everything. Since I'm responsible for keeping all of them running I felt really bad. So I went out and bought a 500G portable Western digital and back up everything important onto it. I also keep a zipped copy of all of our data files stuck away on my computer, her computer, my laptop and my linux box. I take an hour or so once a month and back everything up so data loss should never happen again. Unless we have a tornado or earthquake, which is very possible. We live in tornado alley and they're very common here. And we live in the lead mining capitol of the world, back in the 1800s and early 1900s they mined lead here and all of the unused mines are under the town. In their profound wisdom (sarcasm here) they built three local towns over a series of 800 - 1200 feet deep man made caverns. So if there is a bad earthquake the town disappears.
I'd really rather live where I grew up, about 50 miles to the north of here but we have to be here because my mother in law lives here and can't drive or take care of herself very well. Well, that was supposed to be a short post about data backup, seems it got out of hand.

Just grab the Portable HD and Ruuuun!!!

Hope you never have to do that GMS! Stay safe.

If you can afford it and have a good connection, you could try the myriad of online backup services GMS; that should even be immune to environmental conditions. Still doesn't alleviate the need to do local backup, but offsite backup is what most companies do. I've gotten very lax of late doing my own backups and need to start again (mainly pictures. Resume and such are backed up at so many other places and online as well that I have little concern for that). At least you realize that it isn't a backup unless you have it in at least 2 different locations. Even that may not be good as unfortunately happened in your case. Just wondering; assumed you already tried to do chkdsk and the like. Other tools out there that can do a much better job at retrieving data even if the FAT gets demolished. Data is just too precious not to try I say.

Hopefully it won't happen in my lifetime but we're not that far from the New Madrid fault which is supposed to be one of the deadliest in the world. Excerpt from that article:
In a report filed in November 2008, The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency warned that a serious earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone could result in "the highest economic losses due to a natural disaster in the United States," further predicting "widespread and catastrophic" damage across Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and particularly Tennessee, where a 7.7 magnitude quake or greater would cause damage to tens of thousands of structures affecting water distribution, transportation systems, and other vital infrastructure.[21] The earthquake is expected to also result in many thousands of fatalities, with more than 4,000 of the fatalities expected in Memphis alone.

According to some scientists, however, that is nothing compared to what an 8.0 earthquake could do to the New Madrid Region. An earthquake of that size on the New Madrid Fault would destroy 60 percent of Memphis, killing tens of thousands and causing over $50 billion dollars in property damage in the city alone [22].

The potential for the recurrence of large earthquakes and their impact today on densely populated cities in and around the seismic zone has generated much research devoted to understanding in the New Madrid Seismic Zone. By studying evidence of past quakes and closely monitoring ground motion and current earthquake activity, scientists attempt to understand their causes and recurrence intervals.

In October 2009, a team composed of University of Illinois and Virginia Tech researchers headed by Amr S. Elnashai, funded by FEMA, considered a scenario where all three segments of the New Madrid fault ruptured simultaneously. The report found Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri most severely impacted, with Illinois and Kentucky also impacted but not as seriously. The cities of Memphis, Tennessee and St. Louis, Missouri would be severely damaged.[23]
I'm about half way between Memphis and St Louis, both are doomed to get hit. I don't want to be here when it happens.

Yes, I've used online storage, i just have a problem with my data being stuck somewhere in the world on someone else's computer.

Some random advice for different backups: I have found external USB disks excellent choice for backups. They're reasonably cheap. They probably survive even major crash to host computer.

For small backups, for example personal data, USB sticks are large enough for them. 16 or even 32 GB stick can handle quite a lot.

For small off-site backup needs you can mail yourself zipped files in GMail. If you want security, you can crypt contents.

I know nothing works for photographers or video makers, the amount of data in those activities is humongous. I suppose there are pro solutions for them.

Glad to hear you got your new system up and running kimppi!