well, this is a somewhat pointless thread, but to hell with it. i'm excited and if no one cares except me, so be it. 
basically i occasionally had various backup solution across different platforms. generally revolving around rsync or creating direct images of drives. these have saved my ass many times after data loss, hardware failure and mugging at knifepoint.
in all these cases i was lucky in that what i had lost i had recent backups of. for years though i've had a mish-mash of harddrives not mirrored anywhere, but like i say, i was lucky. i could of course have solved these problems with $$$, but i've never been one for having much of that to spend on hardware.
well, as of today, i almost fell over myself in realisation of my stupidity. i had an empty drive sitting in my case that was too small to hold anything useful (320gb) and i had been swapping a series of loose drives in and out of an external enclosure including a 1.5tb drive i used to backup my most important work.
well ****, i just swapped them over and now, thanks to simple way time machine works, i can make periodic backups to that drive from my other external drives. duh.
i may have increased my risk of loss due to lightning/power surge, which is extremely minimal for harddrives, however, in regards to theft, considering the case weights over 25kg i think i have actually improved my protection from theft.
anyway, this is cool because of the simplicity of dropping drives in and out of time machine backups. rysync is great, but doesn't work nearly as well in this situation.
basically i occasionally had various backup solution across different platforms. generally revolving around rsync or creating direct images of drives. these have saved my ass many times after data loss, hardware failure and mugging at knifepoint.
in all these cases i was lucky in that what i had lost i had recent backups of. for years though i've had a mish-mash of harddrives not mirrored anywhere, but like i say, i was lucky. i could of course have solved these problems with $$$, but i've never been one for having much of that to spend on hardware.
well, as of today, i almost fell over myself in realisation of my stupidity. i had an empty drive sitting in my case that was too small to hold anything useful (320gb) and i had been swapping a series of loose drives in and out of an external enclosure including a 1.5tb drive i used to backup my most important work.
well ****, i just swapped them over and now, thanks to simple way time machine works, i can make periodic backups to that drive from my other external drives. duh.
i may have increased my risk of loss due to lightning/power surge, which is extremely minimal for harddrives, however, in regards to theft, considering the case weights over 25kg i think i have actually improved my protection from theft.
anyway, this is cool because of the simplicity of dropping drives in and out of time machine backups. rysync is great, but doesn't work nearly as well in this situation.