Applies to both self and institution taught. I came through the self taught route and have been developing software (and employing developers) for 20 years. Theory is great but a natural developer will absorb that even if self taught - and I do believe developers are born rather than made. Many of the mediocre developers are simply doing the wrong job and will never excel because they don't have the right mindset. In the real world I am far more interested in someone who will deliver the required solution than what formal training they have had. And that (usually) means somebody with a track record of successful delivery

+ 1 for build a NAS. Your backup doesn't need to be very portable. I started out with FreeNAS, if you go this route ZFS would be the logical choice. I got pretty frustrated with this so rebuilt my NAS using Ubuntu and EXT3 - it made sense to me to use the native FS for the OS. I currently have 4 x 1TB internal drives in raid 5 (one spare). I use a USB drive to back this up. SMB internally and all the files are accessible by every OS I use. If I need to take files out and about there are good old USB sticks or portable drives. Mine are usually NTFS or FAT 32 because anything can read these - and of course there's always good old FTP on the NAS

Time to get a life I'm afraid. The average user doesn't care about how it works and why should they. Until this attitude changes Windows will remain the dominant desktop OS. My wife wouldn't know a CLI if it hit her over the head. Yet she can do everything she wants on Windows. She also uses my Macbook and Ubuntu desktop and I didn't have to teach her anything. She happily accepts that she has no access to my servers (proper servers with no GUI installed) and doesn't want to. In the same way I have never explained to her the difference between diesel and petrol engines. She doesn't care and is able to drive my car because it just works.Of course I did explain that using the incorrect fuel will cause very expensive damage - but that is all she needs to know!