And we're back!

I picked up a new 750GB external hard drive last night at Best Buy so that I can have one place to back up all of my files rather than spending hours upon hours of burning everything to DVD. I got all of my files moved over to it last night.

I woke up early this morning waiting for Jen and Nathan to come pick me up to go to the Cooper-Young Festival, so I decided to go ahead and format my computer since it has been running like crap lately and had a lot of junk on it that I don't use/need.  After I verified that all of my files were successfully moved to the new drive, I began the process.  After a few snags getting my computer to finally boot to the DVD-ROM drive and not freezing up when reading the Windows XP disk, I finally got it done.  I reinstalled all my drivers and basic programs.

I bought a copy of Acronis TrueImage 11 to backup my hard drive since I can't find my Ghost boot disk.  Acronis is much simpler to use and compresses images better than Ghost.  I created the image and backed it up to the external drive.  This will simplify things in the future making it unnecessary for me to have to worry about backing up all of my files and then going through the whole formatting and reinstalling process.  Now all I have to do is boot to the Acronis boot disk choose the image and click Restore.  I have it set to do an incremental backup every week so that I can minimize any lost information in the event that I do have to do a restore.

In other news, we had a good time at the Cooper-Young Festival this morning until the masses of people showed up.  There was some nice stuff there.  For those that don't know, the Cooper-Young area is the young/hipster/artsy/liberal area of Memphis.  Every year they have a festival.  The streets are lined with booths of people selling their crafts and art as well as various food and drink booths.  We found a natural products booth selling soaps and various other things.  They had a few little baskets with organic dog treats so I picked up some Peanut Butter and Oatmeal treats as well as some Bacon and Cheese treats for Pete. 

When the crowds picked up we decided to get going.  It was starting to get pretty warm out and the sun was beating down pretty fierce.  We stopped by Raffi's Deli on the way and had some lunch.  Today has been a lot of fun.  I hadn't been to the Festival in a couple of years.  I was glad that I made it out there this year.