I have been in the computer industry for over 40 years primarily as an engigrammer/progineer (engineer & programmer) but I am new to LINUX. I am in the process of switching my primary OS to openSUSE after many years using Windows. I have explored UNIX platforms beginning with AIX and always went back to Windows mainly because of its application base and because I was developing drivers and other applications as a member of the Microsoft Developer Network. My main computer crashed recently so I built a hot new dual-core AMD system with plenty of resource for Windows Vista. Vista was such a bad experience I decided to try LINUX again and settled on openSUSE. I am still learning but I like what I see more and more every day - especially the cost.

Welcome - good to see another "kid" convert.
40+ years ... mmmm; AIX and MSN - you'll enjoy access to the source code then.

I was told many years ago that you either have an aggressive backup plan or you will be in deep trouble. I still believe that is true. I am still trying to get a SUSE installation the way I want it and have not backed it up yet - probably soon. I do not keep any working data including drivers on my system disk; they are either on a network server or a different physical disk on my desktop.

I am still running Vista and SUSE on the same system but I use removable (mobile) drives. I do not want both systems in the same PC together. Windows has been suspected of trashing other resident operating systems in the past & I do not want to be the victim of an accident.

For my purposes, I have a relatively large, 2TB backup/restore system. I do not trust RAIDs primarily because I have had several cases where I lost everything due to a glitch in the NTFS. Having a RAID recovery does not help a corrupt file system. I prefer to maintain multiple generations of backup on separate physical drives. Eventually, I may go to multiple RAIDs but not yet.