Also think about net neutrality. By telling their customers to watch Viacom channels over the internet, they _still_ get their customers to buy high-speed internet, but can then turn around and bill Viacom for access to their high-speed subscribers (by providing Viacom with "preferred" bandwidth).

Time Warner is essentially trying to turn the current business model on it's head by not only charging content subscribers, but _also_ charging content providers.

For backups, I'd recommend one of the many online services. I used to do backups using a custom shell script, but you really can't beat the online services in terms of ease-of-use. Personally, I use Mozy. It's $55 a year for unlimited storage, but they offer 2GB free (and for a lot of folks, that's really all they need). If you have a lot of computers, you can set up a single account to manage all of them.

As for file sharing, if all you're doing is sharing photos, I'd recommend a site like flickr. For other stuff, dropbox seems to work well.