Backups.
The Achilles’ heel of most home users’ backup strategy is that they don’t have one.
How true. Like so many users, I learnt it the hard way, via a highly educational hard disk failure. Luckily, Linux provides a whole lot of data rescue utilities, and I ended up getting all my data back (but I won’t use the Reiser file system again—not that it’s bad, but it makes data recovery a bit harder than others.)
I just installed the Simple Backup Suite described in the article the quote is from . It looks complete and easy, and helps me structure the backup process. Much better than doing things by hand and immediately forgetting about how you did it.
Oh, and do take Ubuntu Linux (site en français) for a spin.