dougoftheabaci

OK, it depends. Wow, I say that a lot. First off, for the vast majority of people Time Machine is enough and as for it being over-kill, the hourly backups aren't full system backups. Mostly it's just Time Machine going, "Has anything changed? Yep? OK, I'll have that." Which is why the majority of backups are only a few megabytes. Rarely anything extreme. If you're going to a FW800 drive even USB 2.0 it'll take a few seconds and you won't notice it. While there is a very minor hit to system resources it's actually mostly to drive performance and not total system performance. So if you're doing a lot of data-intensive read/write then you'd notice a change but if there will be no discernable difference in terms of audio performance. Here's how to think of it: Your computer hard drive is going to be capable of 100+ MBps transfers on your system. Or, in other words, enough speed to transfer five or so lossless tracks every second. There really is no great benefit for forcing Time Machine to do daily backups and if you're doing weekly... Well better you than me is all I can say. As has been said by others, the best backup strategy is the 3:2:1 strategy, as it's commonly known: 3 copies, 2 on-site, 1 off-site. The first two copies are the active copy (you're computer) and it's backup. This backs up to a third copy somewhere out of your house. The idea of the third is to protect against theft or fire/flood/nature, that sort of thing. Personally, I don't bother with the off-site backup. It only protects against the most rare of circumstances and, to be completely honest, I don't really care that much. There is no data I currently posses that I would truly hate to lose. As for the idea of a fire box, sure. Again, to me such measures are over-kill but whatever, if you care that much about your data go for it. Then... If you care THAT much about your data you shouldn't be backing up to an external hard drive, you should be backing up to a local NAS running a ZFS mirrored ZRAID. Odd as it seems, most people worry so much about losing a file that they never think of all the much more common reasons people lose large amounts of files: Hardware failures. You could go RAID but RAID is actually rather error-prone and was designed for performance, not reliability. That's why I said ZFS, which is a file system solution that was designed specifically for pure data redundancy. There's a performance hit vs. hardware RAID because it's done at the filesystem level but it's not that much and there's no risk of data corruption. Should you choose, you can build a very nice FreeNAS server for around $900 including all the hardware. *EDIT* If you find Time Machine too system-intensive then you could learn how to use RSYNC, which does a very similar thing only instead of backing up the entire file each time there's a change it backs up individual segments of the file. The end result being a much smaller, faster transfer. Of course, it requires a certain level of Terminal use.