After a few initial days of work, I've now installed all the tools I need including but far from limited to VS2010, Resharper, SQL Server Express 2008, NUnit, Git Extensions, Tortoise, Beyond Compare and many more. The project that I will be working on is also configured with locally running IIS7 websites, SQL server databases, certificates and, again, much more.

Now is the time, I think, to do a backup/snapshot/whatever of my Windows partition, because I certainly do not want to go through the entire install/configure process again and my Windows installation is still fairly clean.

I considered using Fusions "snapshot" feature, but VMWare recommends that you don't use snapshots as a backup strategy.

My first move is to use WinClone to create a backup image of the entire boot camp partition, since Time Machine only backs up my OS X files. The otherwise incredible tool Super Duper will not do the trick here, since it only handles OS X partitions. A caveat here is that WinClone is discontinued from the originator and doesn't support Lion. However, an alternative version that does support Lion can be found here. I'm currently backing up my Boot Camp partition to a USB drive. Next step will be to test if that backup can actually be used for anything.

I used the Jungle Disk software to provide the mapping from the S3 web service interface to a network drive. You give Jungle Disk your S3 account information, and it provides a network disk which you can use as the backup device. I first tried my existing backup software (Synchronize! Pro X) and it happily began creating directories and copying files. I then tried the backup feature built into Jungle Disk, and it works fine too. It's not fast compared to a local FireWire disk. It's limited to your upload bandwidth, which often is substantially smaller than the download bandwidth.

Anyway, it has been tugging along today storing 5 GB of by digital photos. It feels pretty good to know that my photos are now stored encrypted and with 99.99% availability somewhere far far away, costing me only 75 cents per month after the initial $2 for the transfer.