I have a lot of data to move off my laptop before I change operating systems from OpenSolaris to Ubuntu. I had finally figured out how to format an external (usb) drive to fat32. My plan was to tar the data and copy it to the dos partition, then copy it back when I changed systems. I immediately ran into the problem of the file size limit being 4g.
So, I took about an old iMac that had died in the last power spike we had. I took the hard drive from that and put it in my 10 year of Dell that had been running FreeBSD, and put FreeBSD back on it. I moved the external drive over to it and formatted all but 60g to FreeBSD's file system. Backing up the home directories off the laptop took just short of 24 hours. This was because of a combination of some large files, including 3 nearly 20g virtual box images, a very old and slow network card on the Dell, and slow (by today's standards) usb on the Dell.
The data is finally backed up, so tonight I will change to Ubuntu. Then I will setup automatic backups to the FreeBSD box, so if I decide Ubuntu was not the right direction, I won't have to go through this again.
I may also begin looking around for a newer, old computer to replace the Dell. I should be able to get something with faster usb and a faster network card for not a lot of money.
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