DHL is faster than 45kBps.

As noted earlier, my geodistributed backup strategy involves using FolderShare and a junky PC in my parents’ basement in New York.

Unfortunately, a while ago, a hard drive failed, and it was simply cheaper to use another hard drive they had lying around then for me to buy another one. Also, I didn’t want to have the machine shipped here in California to install and activate Windows.

Fortunately through the power of Remote Desktop, I was able to configure the PC to all of my specifications - including upgrading from Retrospect software to Acronis TrueImage. (If you’re from Acronis, please contact me. TrueImage’s UI is… uh… a bit clunky.)

I hit a small snag though - I have ~26 GB of photos I’d like to replicate over to New York. Using FolderShare, I’m able to upload at about the rate of 45kBps. This means it would take 606,500 seconds - or about 7 days. Let’s just say that as of this writing, I’m in about Day 3.

It’s pretty obvious that it would’ve been a lot faster for me to burn about 6 DVDs, and shipped them overnight via DHL. After my Microsoft discount on DHL, that probably would’ve cost me about $10 at the most - but that’s more money than I wanted to spend on this. And I’m not in a rush. (Though I wonder if my parents wonder what their bandwidth suddenly dropped by about 45kBps! )

This is a pretty good reminder that sometimes old fashion transport can be faster than your Internet.