Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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On July 26th I signed up for Carbonite. This photo is worth a thousand words. I managed to back up all the lossless WMA music I have ripped as well as all my RAW photos. Total amount backed up is 107202 MB (roughly 107 GB) over 46 days. I averaged about 2.3 GB a day uploaded, or 1.6 MB/minute.
The nice thing is that through the entire process I used my PC normally, Vonage seemed to work just fine, and I didn't notice anything special going on. For the record, I use Comcast at home and I get 3474 downstream / 349 upstream (kbps) to Reston, VA where Carbonite's Data Center is.
Anyway, I could have never reasonably backed up all my ripped music and maintained the data remotely, dito for my photos. Now that I've made it this far I need to finish organizing my photos so that I can upload all the jpegs as well.
If you want to try out Carbonite, use this link and you'll get a free month (and I'll get 3!).
Note: I don't recommend this be your only backup strategy. For one thing restoring over 100 GB will take a long time. You should have DVD or other archival media backups of your important photos, data etc (I create a DVD backup of photos regularly) and consider running your computer using some kind of RAID (I use RAID-1 for my desktop PC at home). RAID has saved my ass numerous times, and comes in really handy when one of your drives is about to go south (you can RMA the drive, pop the new drive in, watch happily as the RAID rebuilds itself and return the bad drive with about 5 min of total downtime). I have done this 4 times in the last 4 years. I'm also considering getting a > 1 Terrabyte RAID system from Infrant for my Video/TV/Audio/Pictures so that I don't have to have this data sitting on my desktop and Media Center.