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On 25/10/12 17:56, Neil Winchurst wrote: > A little while ago I ran a thread about VBox. One of the list members > told me in no uncertain terms that I should upgrade from my current > distro which is Mint 10 KDE, based on Maverick. > > That was the reason for using VBox, to check out possible replacement > distros. Meanwhile I think that it would be sensible to get an external > disk drive to keep a copy of my current home folder so that I won't lose > anything. I am not worried about emails as I use IMAP so I will not lose > anything there. > > I won't need a drive any larger than 500mb, in fact even that would be a > bit OTT for me. Does anyone have any recommendations please? I have been > looking around Amazon etc and am now completely bewildered by it all. > > As for which distro to choose as the new one...!!! I have got it down to > four possibles, but for every good review there is one not so good. > > Thanks for any help, > > Neil > Yes, that would have been me - running any operating system that stopped getting security fixes 6 months ago is probably not a good idea! Is 500Mb a typo? That's a *really* small /home. In your case, why bother with an external USB drive if you have so little to back up? An easier option would be to buy 2 x 16Gb USB thumbdrives (less than £10 each from your choice of online retailer) and set your backup tool (good old rsync from cron is my favourite) to automatically synchronise your /home once a day. Unlike expensive, slow USB attached disks, a 16Gb stick will survive being dropped, put through the washing machine, etc and for £20 you get redundant backups. Being so small, it's easy to drop one off at work/the girlfriends/wherever so even if your house burns down you've at least got your data safe. Whilst you're buying drives online, I would hugely recommend plunking ~£100 on a 128Gb SSD (I'm partial to the Corsair Force 3 models) to use as your OS drive. If you've never used one before, the speed increase will absolutely blow you away. Adding more RAM used to be the default "best bang for buck" upgrade to any computer but not any more. Even if you've only got SATA2 on your PC, the performance increase is awesome (and you can buy an el cheapo PCIe SATA3 card for less than £15 anyway). What's your shortlist of 4 distros incidentally? I'd still really encourage you to just get on with it and install Debian Testing whilst you're thinking - by the time you've come to a decision, Debian will already be installed and running beautifully and you'll be wondering why you were ever thinking about a different distro anyway. Regards -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq