...and here we are.
Just before a family visit this weekend, my old Dell e6530 started shutting off randomly, reporting thermal issues (even when cold). This, plus the fact that the final output to the HDMI stopped working was kinda the last straw. So my house guests are gone, and I spent a good bit of time practising those rusty restore skills.
Fortunately, I'd recently instituted a daily backup on power up of all my data onto a Seagate 2T portable USB disk drive. So all I had to do was move the drive over to my Acer A0722 laptop, fire up Linux, and install Luckybackup. Then add four tasks under the default profile to RESTORE each directory. Actually it turned out the biggest wait of about 6 hours was "Videos", all of the other directories I'd populated when I installed Linux on the Acer, so they were only incremental. Lesson learned: make daily backups.
As to the performance of the Acer, a dual CPU box is definitely not as snappy as a quad CPU. But at least I have my big 32" screen back, and it works. Plus the Acer is much much quieter, and I don't have a cooling fan running under the CPU, either.
Perhaps after we move house this spring I can agitate for a new laptop. Or at least a newer laptop lol.