I use Super Duper! once a minute and rotate through 2 Raid1 Servers which back up to another 2 Raid1 servers which back up to another 2 Raid1 servers and so on.

In fact my data is so precious that I also do a complete dump of everything to an old dot matrix printer every second of every day.

My faithful manservant, Horstt, feeds this dump into an old Xerox machine and then scans the copies into my second desktop machine which is set up as a webserver.

Though his grasp of complex computing principles could be described as "Neanderthal", Horstt completes a complex schedule of backups from this second machine (which is networked to the first), as well as a series of impressionistic sketches in crayon that convey the very essence of the data he has posted.

As a fail-safe, he also downloads every posting using an old TRS-80 we found in the basement and backs that up on a tape drive that I bought in a dump sale from Crays back in the day.

When I am resting, (admittedly this is not as often as it used to be given the incessant noise and constant requirements of my back-ups), I send Horstt out foraging for wood and other scraps or small rodents that we can either cook or pulp to feed the paper mill I constructed behind the house.

Unfortunately, the neighbourhood is not what it used to be as the noise has driven all but the criminally insane far away.

Understandably the trees had to be chopped down to feed my insatiable appetite for data security, but I consider the loss of general amenity, (ie. my neighbourhood looks like a moon-crater), a small price to pay for that sense of peace I have in the odd millisecond between the elecronic whirring and the general clatter.

You'll be pleased to hear that lately I feel my productivity has actually increased ever so slightly, as I now have the utmost faith in my backup system that I've actually been able to sit down and code for maybe ten minutes in a row ... of course, with the dot matrix printer whirring away near my ear and Horstt's frequent muttering, I tend to find my code is just rubbish, but the important thing is that it's MY rubbish, and all of it is being captured and archived for posterity.

Now of course something I failed to mention is my UPS and my external solar array linked to the generator in the shed ... You can never be too careful.

I did read some benchmarks showing that when near capacity the 4200rpm drive is actually faster than the 5400rpm notebook drive. I'm not sure I believe this, since it definitely goes against the conventional wisdom, but I'd be interested to hear what other people have observed. It does make a little sense in that the 4200rpm drive must have greater data density.

Perhaps that is because you chose a drive that operates at 4200rpm. There is a reason that Apple defaults these machines to a 5400rpm drive. Yes, you are stuck at 4200rpm if you want a 200GB drive, but please, realize that this is a matter of the speed of your drive, and not about laptop drives in general (though I do agree with you that 4200rpm is damn slow).

Jonathon: I run DiskWarrior's directory rebuild about once a week. I don't use its other features. I only recently started using Drive Genius, because I found that its Scan feature would let me check all my drives for bad blocks.

Nate: Perhaps it's irrational, but I just don't want AppleCare. It sounds like extortion. I've been maintaining Macs for more than 15 years, and I don't bang them around much. Some have died during the first year (covered by warranty), but none have died during the second or third year. I figure that with all the money I've not spent on AppleCare, I could buy a replacement Mac if needed.

Mr. Orange: Theoretically, cloning will wear the drive out faster. However, based on how long drives are supposed to last, I don't worry about it. Also, Smart Update puts less strain on the drive, since it only copies the files that have changed. In my case, most of the files are data; applications are only a small fraction. I make daily full .dmg backups of the main folders that are changing. The chances that this will help me discover a problem with the drive early, before it's gotten serious, are much greater than the chances that it will wear out the drive before I was going to replace it, anyway.