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.
Powered by: newtelligence dasBlog 2.3.9074.18820
Disclaimer The posts on this weblog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
E-mail
I love life hacks like this. Mike Torres and I were emailing back and forth today about our backup strategies, and recent discovery of JungleDisk (which is an excellent program) and cheap storage via Amazon S3 when the discussion spiraled into how to deal with "journaling" changes that a daily backup will not address (if you delete a file, then the backup no longer has the tombstoned file etc).
Anyway, Mike told me that he hid his Recycle Bin and basically has ignored it. You see the problem with the Recycle Bin is that since the beginning of time (since I used a Mac) I used to empty the thing a few times a day. Why is that? In fact, my father suffers from this same problem. He cannot stand seeing the Recycle Bin full.
Much like the trash cans in our lives, they are meant to be emptied. But, if you think about it there is no good reason to empty it these days. In fact, if you let Windows do its thing, the Recycle Bin will just sit there and get bigger and bigger till it reaches it's allotted size, then it will automatically purge itself. You can specify how large it's allowed to get:
But in order to realize this benefit, you should hide your Recycle Bin. I just did this on all my machines and I feel better already.
To disable the Recycle Bin do the following:
Vista
Windows XP
Method 1
Method 2
BTW, my backup strategy is totally influx now. I'm using Carbonite, Amazon S3 (via JungleDisk), a local server and FolderShare. The things I have to backup are a bit complex (my stuff, shared stuff, my wife's stuff etc). When things settle down I'll blog about it cause I hope to have a system that can be cloned into a LifeHack. Right now I have 5 computers between work/home and they all have data I want everywhere and want backed up... not easy.