The rapidly falling prices of hard drives does make the copy-disk approach much more viable. However, one should still be careful to have multiple copies of important data going back in time. A not uncommon problem is where an important file gets corrupted or accidently deleted, and you don't notice it right away. A nightly copy-disk operation will then copy the corrupted or now-missing file over the previous copy; and if that was your only backup, it's now gone. :(
I had thought that may be a consideration with cloning a hard drive for use as a backup. In the case of Retrospect though it has:
"Point-in-Time Restores
Roll back any folder, file, or disk to a previously backed up state - even restore the operating system. The Retrospect 5.1 product CD now provides bootable OS X disaster recovery."
Which I believe would allow for the opportunity to restore a file to one of it's previous versions.
I'd suggest rotating through several external disks (or alternatively, partitions on a single super-sized external disk). This gives you several days' backup and you might want to keep a few weekly or monthly copies depending on how much data you update per day and how costly it would be for you to recreate it.
My data is all of the personal variety, so if the worst case scenario were to happen my livelihood would depend on it. I'd just be unhappy. I'm probably going to get a 120 GB external (maybe bigger) and partition it in one fashion or another. Then I think I'll give both Retrospect and CCC a try to see what I can accomplish with each and which best suits my needs.
For example, my most irreplaceable data--including five years' worth of digital photographs of my family--is currently sitting on 4 different hard drives. It's also been burned onto a couple of CDs which I keep offsite in case of some catastrophe that takes out all my disk drives (e.g., my house burns down).
With something like digital photographs I would definitely make sure I had multiple copies. On a related note I was recently watching one of those home improvement shows where an "Organizer" helps get your stuff organized and they told the homeowner to throw away their photo negatives as they had the prints and didn't need them. Duh! I hope nothing ever happens to those prints.
-- Regards,
Allen ------------------------------------------------------------------------- iMac (Flat Panel)/G4 1GHz/256MB RAM/80GB HD/Super Drive/Mac OS X 10.2.8 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- iMac (Rev. B/Bondi Blue)/G3 233MHz/160MB RAM/4GB HD/CD-ROM/Mac OS 8.6 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Performa 600CD/68030 32MHz/20MB RAM/160MB HD/CD-ROM/Floppy/Mac OS 7.5 -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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