Good luck Editha, so glad your Mum is sounding better. Try and keep calm through all the packing etc!

feelbritish, I hope house sells fast--

thinking of you both and of all who are making the move.

Five weeks to go. Item 297 on the packing list. I've done all the packing I can now before the last few days when we pack the stuff we use day-to-day. OH still has some of his books and papers to pack.

Today I'm starting on the task of weeding and backing up our computer files. We are going to discard our desktops because we never use them any more. We are only taking our Mac Airbooks and our iPads with us.

There is a complication that I used to be a Linux enthusiast and my desktop is still running Ubuntu, which means I need to convert the files before transferring them to the Mac. That will take a while.

I want to make sure we have at least three copies of everything: one on the laptop hard-drive, one on a usb or an external drive and one in cloud storage. I haven't decided whether to use Dropbox or iCloud yet. It will probably be Dropbox because I've never got my head round iCloud.

+1 for dropbox, my personal recommendation would be the microsoft OneDrive offering as it has the most space, but since your a mac user it might be hard to set that one up.

Good luck with your move Editha !!

There's no way I would ever put my personal data in the cloud or on Dropbox - for security purposes!

You already have your personal data on the Internet. What's the difference?

If I want to keep anything secure, I don't put it on an internet enabled computer.

Granted, anything that passes through the Internet, such as email, is not private anymore but I wouldn't dream of storing my data on the Internet.

That's the best way.

Good luck Editha - just been catching up on your thread. I hope things go well for you with the move. Re: the pissed off husband - that's a state that is common in academics! (having been married to one I can say that!). I just hope he appreciates all the hard work you are doing with the packing - I know it took me forever to sort out when we moved to Canada and whilst I moved back by myself, the 19 boxes of stuff I packed took a lot of time - I can't imagine packing the volume you are doing!

Also, just to add, one of the lovely things about coming back to the UK is the food - I love buying from the supermarkets and food stores and markets here - it's so much nicer than what I found in Ontario.

Four weeks to go.

OH left this morning to spend a week saying goodbye to his relatives on Vancouver Island. The reason I'm not going with him is our senile cat, who can't be left with anyone any more.

His absence gives me a break from our busy social life, as so many people have wanted to say goodbye to us. We went to a concert yesterday and were surprised by a goodbye from the stage (the conductor is a friend). I'm rather glad to get a week off dinners and barbecues. I've eaten more meat in the last week than I usually eat in two months and feel horribly bloated as a result.

I'm starting the process of closing down utility accounts etc here and ordering them in the UK. I had difficulty with 'Verified by Visa' yesterday when I was setting up phone and internet with BT. I loathe VbV and PayPal. The password never seems to be the one I think it is. As a result, my UK visa card got frozen overnight. I got it reinstated this morning but I'm going to see if I can set fresh passwords for VbV and Paypal today, so there is no risk that it happens again.

You might not dream of it, but almost inevitably there's a ton of personal data about you that is on the internet. Personally, I'm more concerned about the possibility of the theft of supposedly secure personal data from say, government agencies, employers, retailers etc, than I am from dropbox/icloud/google drive etc.

Actually, I've decided not to attempt to back up our entire systems on Dropbox or other cloud storage. It takes too long to upload, and slows down our internet while doing so, plus we'd have to pay for that amount of storage.

Instead we are using thumb drives and an external hard drive. We also have an Apple time capsule.

Think that should do it.

Only thing - upload critical things like passport photocopies , birth certificates etc copies of all those to cloud storage so you can access them in an instant if need be!