Well, finally. I have finally bought a new HDD and moved all the data from the other PCs in this household onto this HDD. There were also several backups of my data from the times I tried to rescue whatever I could after Windows refused to boot.
And boy, that happened every so often. Of course it was no picnic: a 35GB disk, 90% full, and the only thing I could do was boot Linux from a drive that recognized the CD on roughly the 30th attempt (so I had to eject it and push it back in 30 times), then copy everything over the network to a laptop that gets a single bar of Wi-Fi signal and has no cable running to it.
Simply put, it was nerve-racking. And on top of that I had to worry that someone might delete the data, because my dad thinks that when it says “PC is low on memory“, it means the hard drive, and he kept getting that memory warning all the time because he only had 1GB shared with the graphics card running full Vista without any tweaks to the system. Not even the biggest swap file helped. Anyway, today I have a good optical drive and the external HDD too; the only thing that bugs me a bit is the enclosure – it cost 220 CZK, but I probably should have paid a little extra for something better instead of buying the cheapest junk.
Back to the disks – I have so much data now that on Music E: alone I have more data than fits on it, namely about 17GB so far – most of the music is on my dad’s PC, because it has a card reader, and I will copy from there to the memory cards of 2 Samsung phones and to my MP3 player. Those 17GB, largely Gigi’s Cammino mixes, are not enough for me, so I am off to download the rest of the Cammino mixes from reloaded m2o if they are still there. After all, it has been a few months since Gigi left the radio station, and they certainly will not keep gigabytes of his mixes on the server forever.