+1 Edouard. In this day in age, with terabytes so cheap per gig, there is no reason to lose wedding, child birth, birthday photos because of hard drive failure. Losing Wx data is one thing, losing the pictures of your child's 3rd birthday is catastrophic.
I'm with Steve, I don't fit the mold of the poll.
All my data sits on an external
ThunderBolt Raid, which also holds my Time Machine volume.
The Raid and iMac are cloned each night via Carbon Copy Cloner to an external drive (a
cheap bare drive sitting in a
Voyager Dock).
Once a week, I rotate out the Voyager backup drive to an offsite location (my mom's safe a few miles away), and every few months, rotate another one to my mailbox half a world away in Hong Kong (EMP protection. Ha!). I have five backup drives that fit in the Voyager dock, and rotate them through about one drive per week. You never want just one backup drive because a glitch could kill both the source and the clone at once.
Also each night, via Carbon Copy Cloner (I love that program) I SFTP a clone of all data changes to a drive connected to my Mom's iMac, just in case there is a flood/fire/theft at my house before I can rotate out my backup drive.
The best approach is a multi-pronged one:
Time Machine for incremental backups | Clone for quick, full data replacement | Off-site backup when the house burns down
Too much reliance on any one single prong will leave you in a world of hurt. Example: Cloud only backup is fine until you have to restore at 5 MB/s second, or a Time Machine drive that died in the flood next to your iMac.
Do you have a buddy or relative that lives nearby? Use their guest room closet to rotate out a backup drive (encrypted if they aren't
that good a friend). Better yet, use CCC to FTP data to a volume connected to a family or friend's computer, and offer the same for them. Cloud backup companies are fine, but these are much cheap options.
Remember:
*Time Machine is great for finding a mistakenly deleted file, but for full hard drive replacement, it's a real pain.
*For full hard drive replacement due to failure/theft/fire nothing beats having a full
bootable clone.
*Time Machine and full clones sitting by the computer are not a good backup.
*Always have off-site backups, or the next theft/fire/flood will leave you with a trail of tears.
*Raid is not a backup
*Raid is not a backup
*Raid is not a backup
(Raid is for fault tolerance)
Folks, drives are cheap, your data is priceless.All the best,
dfw