I have gazion megabytes of data, can all this crap be converted to Unix, Linux?
I’m not a tech guy, I just know a few things(/s). Your best bet is always going to be Linux for storage and retrieval. If you just want to transfer it to a different medium them you wont need either for the time being. Hard drives are cheap and Windows is about as straightforward as you can get as far as copying your data goes.
Depends upon what type of data it is.
If it's primarily word and excel docs, graphics or vids, then sure. If you do a lot of stuff in visio, then not so much. One of the best ways to see if it will work for you is to download a copy of Knoppix or Ubuntu. You can boot and run them right from the cd/dvd without affecting your hard disk at all. If you like it, you can install it locally, if not, just reboot and you're back to where you started. "Live" distributions are a great way to test out linux.