Nick, there are definitely benefits (including peace of mind) to having the backed-up data directly accessible. Not just for restoration, but also for when you just want to have a look at what's changed.
On my Macs I use ChronoSync to create mirror back ups of my date files. I use several 750GB OWC external FW800/400 drives to create redundant back ups. I rotate a set of back up drives weekly through a safe deposit box at my bank to have a copy of critical data and all photos and videos off site in case of a fire.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=209079\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Similar to my own setup. A couple of questions though: How often do you update the backups? How far back do you keep the backups? (i.e. how many sets of disks do you have?)
If your oldest backup is a week old, then if there was a problem (e.g. a software bug that corrupted files) you'd only have a week to notice it. I do a lot of testing of beta software here so I'm particularly aware of this.
I keep most of my images on RAID storage (except for those on laptop internal drives) and mirror these to a set of external disks at least weekly (these are stored on-site but off-line). Every month we swap this with another set stored off-site. So we have RAID protection of files during the week, an on-site copy that's up to a week old, and an off-site copy that's up to a month old.
Everyone will have different requirements (affected by factors such as volume of files created/modified daily, value of the data, etc). But I'm curious: how many people here would regard what I'm doing as underkill/overkill/just-right for their own setups?
Instead of weekly/monthly cycles, would you use daily/weekly (or even daily/weekly/monthly) cycles? Or something else?
I also have a 1.4TB drive on my network to create on going back ups using Apple's Time Machine.
We have networked Time Machine ( TM) volumes on a NAS box for some machines, but use external drives for mobile TM on some of the laptops. For instance on my own laptop I use an external 320GB drive in two partitions: one for TM and one for mirroring the media folders from the internal drive so I can maintain two copies when on the road.
Do you maintain backups of the TM data? We're still refining the best procedures for mirroring those to partitions on disks which are part of the backup sets.