If you don't already have a redundant computer as a backup, consider making the spare share it's disk and using one of the rsync snapshot scripts out there to b

If you don't already have a redundant computer as a backup, consider making the spare share it's disk and using one of the rsync snapshot scripts out there to backup your important stuff regularly. Putting a comprehensive script on it that will get all your email out of your webmail accounts, download any other stuff like pics in your flickr account that you care about, and etc would be a good idea. Put a kill-a-watt on it and see how much power it draws, to consider whether you should leave it on all the time. Booting it up once a week and running the backups might be smarter. As a rough back-of-the-envelope figure, at 11 cents a kilowatt-hour running one watt for a year costs a dollar -- so if it sucks 80 watts sitting their with no monitor (a reasonable figure) that's $80 bucks a year, if you are paying more than 11 cents it is correspondingly more. You can never have too many backups, and in my experience having the data on a complete separate machine is more reliable and easier to recover from than USB disks or other schemes. If everything else dies, just flip on the backup machine and start working from there, presuming it has the necessary software installed.