Our home PC was a 2004 Windows XP machine. I say was because the hard drive died a horrible death last week and would not boot up. In the past I'd panic; however, we now use Mozy Unlimited Backup and I had 35 GB of data stored online. Basically, we would have lost about 10 days worth of files, not a lot, just a few pictures.

In fact, I didn't even have to deal with our Mozy account because of a Ubuntu USB drive. I had created for work a USB stick that one could boot any PC with to an instance of Ubuntu 10.04. I inserted the USB stick into the PC, rebooted and came to a prompt asking whether I wanted to try Ubuntu. After getting to the Ubuntu desktop, I mounted the hard drive that I could no longer boot and a portable external hard drive and easily transferred all of my data files, including installation executable files for some of the software I use, to the portable hard drive. Voila, I now had all of my data backed up on a portable hard drive in a manner of minutes.

I'll still keep Mozy, but am now transferring the bad PC to a Linux box and considering setting up a cron job to save all my data files to a local portable hard drive as well, using something similar to a Pogoplug Multimedia Sharing Device.