Even though Time Machine is probably the greatest out-of-the-box backup solution anyone has come up with, it's not enough when your trade and maybe even your entire life depend on the data in your computer.
1. Disaster Scenario 1: my hard drive dies. That's it. Everything else is okay. For that scenario, I set up a 1 TB MiniMax drive, split into two partitions. In the first partition I created a bootable duplicate using SuperDuper. In the second partition I put Time Machine. I call it First Archive (the Time Machine) and First Duplicate (SuperDuper).
2. DS 2: my computer and peripherals go. Theft, power surge. The first level of backups went with the computer. For this I created offline but onsite protection. That is, in the same building, but not connected to the computer. I used a 500 GB FreeAgent Go drive, which pulls neatly out of its dock for those late-night earthquakes. Same deal, SuperDuper duplicate on one half and, this time, hand-dragged archives, because Time Machine doesn't do archives to more than one drive, at least not easily, and the drive would not be connected to the computer.
3. DS 3: whole building goes. Here I need offsite backup. Same solution. Another FreeAgent drive. This one goes to my weekend house. It won't get updated as often, so I will either lose some recent stuff, or rely on cloud archives (see below).
4. What about "hot" data? That's the stuff I'm working on right now. The first-level protection will do okay with that, but what if I have to go to Stage 2 or 3? The only solution I've found so far is to copy "hot" stuff to a cloud backup: iDisk, Amazon, Mozy. So far I like Mozy the best, though they're all pathetically slow.
One thing I did is to move archival data that doesn't change (old records, closed cases, etc.) to another 1 TB MiniMax. That way the TM backups stay smaller. The archival backups to the second and third FreeAgent drives have all the data from this drive and from the the hard drive.
Suggestions? Ideas?
