From the comments of the aforementioned Ars story:
– The Ars tip basically means blowing your redundancy, unless you have another backup drive somewhere. If the disk decides to bail out at that moment, your data is lost.
- I’ll tell you the biggest risk IMO – crashing hard drives… The second worst common problem I see is lost, deleted, or overwritten files… Compared to these, the “house burns up in a fire” risk is minuscule.
I agree. But my points were that my customer had balls and Time Machine’s biggest failure is the lack of physical security. Hard drives crash everyday. Thankfully, Time Machine has saved a lot of people who otherwise would never backup anything. But it’s not the perfect solution. This comment describes a great scenario:
I run Time Machine constantly with a small portable drive attached to my laptop whenever I am at my office or on site for any appreciable time with a customer. I also run a SuperDuper clone to rotating drives every night. I then back up just my customer files folder to a NAS Raid 0 every night and to S3 every night. Paranoid? Naw. Scared s**tless is more like it.
Data loss is not a bad thing to be afraid of.