Help with data back up drive

I have one 500 GB HDD for my photographs (digital and analog) libraries and editing documents, one 500 GB HDD with my personal video footage in an editing friendly format.
Both 500 GB HDDs get backed up to one 1 TB HDD via CarbonCopyCloner.
And that 1 TB HDD gets backed up to another 1 TB HDD via CarbonCopyCloner.
Therefore I have three copies of my important data.

Or do you mean something else?

 

There are countless backup schemes. A popular one is to use Time Machine on one EHD and then create a bootable clone using either SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner on a totally separate EHD. Here are some MacWorld articles that discuss some different strategies, I think you will see the common thread in these articles is redundant backups are wise.

http://www.macworld.com/article/157414/2011/02/mybackupplanlex.html

http://www.macworld.com/article/156643/2011/01/how_i_back_up_frakes.html?lsrc=top_1

http://www.macworld.com/article/141363/2009/07/backup.html

 

If you can part with $25-30, pick up one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=usb+sata+dock&x=0&y=0
(many items shown, they all work the same, just pick one that's cheap).

Then buy one (or more) "bare" SATA drives from the vendor of your choice (perhaps you know someone who has a "spare" just laying around).

Put the drive in the dock, use Disk Utility to initialize it, partition if desired.

Then use the free CarbonCopyCloner app to "dupe" the contents of your internal drive to the backup on a regular basis. CCC can do incremental backups to speed things up after the original clone, and it can ALSO "archive" files that you delete from your main drive (and, hence, from your cloned backup).

You'll quickly discover that having the USB/SATA dock around (instead of an "external" hard drive locked into an external enclosure) comes in handy for all sorts of tasks. You can even boot from these things.

If you want to "think forward" just a bit, consider buying one that already has USB3 -- by the end of this year, USB3 will have become "the new standard" on Macs, quickly usurping both firewire and thunderbolt.