Upgrade to debian unstable?

I've been looking at how a lot of the stuff in the debian "stable" distribution
seems really out of date, and wondering if I should upgrade to "unstable".
It seems that all I have to do is change "stable" to "unstable" in the
/etc/apt/sources.list file, apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, then I'll
have unstable (hours later after I've downloaded everything). Question is,
should I really do the upgrade? My setup is kinda a toy box, not a server or
anything, but I do like to have safe, as I have an ~5 Gb home dir (mostly
uncompressed source code tarballs) that I don't really want to lose. Is it
a good idea?
Thanks

Digi-John

--
"Our reruns are better than theirs."
-- Nick at Nite