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SuperDuper gives you a bootable clone - no need to reauthorize applications -- it's better for doing an entire system restore than TimeMachine. Actually, they complement each other. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/

Best Mac backup solution ever = external HDD + SuperDuper

Yes, "RAID is not backup", in that you shouldn't simply RAID your primary drive and consider the backup problem solved, but backing up to a RAID array can be advantageous -- you do disk-to-disk backup (via any of a variety of methods), and monitor the health of the RAID array closely -- if any disk in the array goes south, replace it promptly and your backup stays consistent. And, if you keep a spare drive or two around, you can swap a drive out occasionally to take off-site (and let the array rebuild onto one of your spares).

Personally, I like the ReadyNAS Duo a lot more than the Drobo (hard to explain, I just trust their tech better, and the ReadyNAS is natively networked, rather than needing an afterthought add-on). Last I checked, Amazon will sell you an empty ReadyNAS Duo and a couple WD Green 1TB drives for ballpark $500. That said I haven't got a ReadyNAS yet (because money has so many uses these days); I'm using my second most favorite backup setup, a 500GB laptop drive in an external bus-powered FireWire enclosure. I'm using a MacAlly PHR-S250CC enclosure (which I'm very happy with), using a drive I already had, but for a complete setup, I'd probably go with one of Other World Computing's packages for about $150. This loses RAID (which I ultimately want very much to have, for reliability), and isn't networked (which would be good for backing up multiple machines, and ease of use), but the bus-powered drive is so damned easy to use that I actually do it every day (set the drive next to my laptop and plug one cable between them, Time Machine notices the drive and starts a backup, 5-10 minutes later it's done, and I unmount the drive, unplug the cable, and put it back on the shelf).

My primary machine is a Mac; I use Time Machine for daily backups, and use SuperDuper to clone my MBP's drive onto the same backup disk every few weeks (minus a number of large directories that I know Time Machine is getting anyway); this gives me a backup drive I can boot from (via SuperDuper), and a lot of incremental history stored in a very usable manner (via Time Machine). And a backup system that I actually use because it's painless.

Add a ReadyNAS, and I could have my laptop automatically backing (hourly) up any time it's on the home network.

As far as on-line backup goes, I haven't been convinced yet. It eats a lot of bandwidth, and it means that someone else (that I don't know personally) has a copy of all my data, with only their promise of encryption keeping them honest. Sure, there isn't much there for anyone else to get worked up about (a variety of legally purchased music and software, a bunch of old email and vacation photos), but if it's not out of my hands, then that's one less thing I have to worry about. I do love DropBox for moving non-confidential files around, but I wouldn't use it for backup.

Just use SuperDuper!. Their Smart Update feature is fast enough that taking the 15 minutes out of your day to do a backup is relatively painless.

Before Time Machine, I made two bootable backups. One to an external firewire drive and the second to an internal drive. When the software I used--SuperDuper!--updates to Leopard, I'll go back to doing that to at least one drive and possibly continue using Time Machine for the other.

SuperDuper! is cheap and effective. [shrug]

Currently it's downloadable for under $30US. It's also been shown by one tester to be the most effective backup software for OSX at preserving all data. (Aside from dd, of course.) It's aimed at non-technical users, and those are a significant slice of the OSX user population.

So yeah, I think it's worth paying for and I recommend it unreservedly. While dd may be better for some, they're not the ones asking me for backup software recommendations.

(Like Mr. Jones, I'm also not affiliated with shirt pocket in any way other than being a satisfied customer.)

For years, I have ordered all of my systems with at least two hard drives. For laptops, I order an additional external drive. Currently, I have a very simple protocol: I use OS X and clone the entire hard drive with operating system to a second hard drive with SuperDuper! It is fast, it is easy and if the laptop dies, I can simply boot directly from the backup drive, be back up and running and I don't even have to reinstall applications or set all my preferences. It's like nothing ever happened. By the way, I also use this approach for all my workstations. Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Shirt Pocket software other than being a satisfied customer.

I use SuperDuper! to make a clone of my boot partition on a FW drive. "Smart Update" is fast and if something goes bad, I can reboot on the external drive and work immediately, then take the time to fix it later. For important files, I use unison to a remote server via ssh, I prefer it over Rsync. Chronosync is nice to make automatic backups to external drives.

I don't see how Apple's Time Machine could make Super Duper! obsolete, at least for me. What if I can't boot anymore and needs to work now?

I'm no expert, but I can point you to a couple of interesting web pages by people who do seem to know a lot of the details:

• Mac Backup Software Harmful and the earlier The State of Backup and Cloning Tools under Mac OS X at plasticsfuture
• MacOS X Backups at Seth's Unix Tips

You also need to think about what your backups are for and how much time and money you're prepared to expend: for some, burning a few personal files to CDR every few months will suffice, whereas for others an external HD holding a complete clone is the thing, and power users may need daily or weekly incremental backups with the ability to retrieve any file going back years.

Personally speaking, I'm in the middle category, with a large external Firewire HD holding a clone of each of my drives, which I redo every month or so. (Having it bootable is also a good idea, and has saved my bacon at least once!) I've mostly been using Carbon Copy Cloner, which has given good results, but I've recently switched to SuperDuper! which is cheap and seems to preserve absolutely everything. But don't take my word for it: read the linked pages, work out your needs, and make up your own mind.

But DO think about it! Disaster WILL strike in some form or other; disks DO fail (as I know to my cost), and you need to plan for it. It's not a question of how much time or money you can afford to spend; it's a question of how much data you can afford to lose!

In particular, SuperDuper! preserves all metadata, while CCC misses BSD flags, creation date, HFS+ extended attributes, the locked flag, and ACLs. It also knows about Spotlight. The free version works fine, but you can also pay to add scheduling, incremental backups, etc.

(Disclaimer: I've no connection other than as a user who's just moved from CCC to SD!.)

SuperDuper! (yeah, stupid exclamation mark) is also a very very excellent tool, it'll do smart synchronization of the images (thanks to OS X's sparse images), scheduling, sandboxing and a bunch of other great stuff.

Disclaimer: I just bought it, and enjoy justifying my purchase, but it is awesome!

I used to use Carbon Copy Cloner, but then I was lazy about backing up for a while. When I went back to it, it had fallen behind in features to Sup erDuper</a>, and that's what I use now.

I use Carbon Copy Cloner, even though I've also purchased Super Duper which was Tiger-compatible first and seems to have great reviews. I'm just not sure about which script to use. I can't get Psync to work in CCC, so it just backs up the whole drive each time rather than just the changes. Super Duper is supposed to have all that sorted out.

I like to do clean installs for upgrades because I'm under the impression that it frees up space compared to a simple upgrade. It's a bitch to manually do things like transfer email mailboxes, bookmarks, GPG keys, and re-enter keychain passwords, but it seemed to free up a couple of gigs for some reason. There's a feature in Tiger that lets you transfer everything over from an older computer, for people that are upgrading their hardware. If you created a bootable backup, you can trick Tiger into recognising that backup drive as an older computer that you want to transfer everything over from. That doesn't free up as much space as a manual transfer either, though.

You can also try SuperDuper from Shirt-Pocket - http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperD escription.html.
The cloning part of the program is free.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but after watching the video, it seems there would be at least two advantages over Knoppix:

1. A USB Flash drive/MP3 player is somthing you might be carrying anyway.

2. It looks as if you can mirror your internal drive to the USB device as a precautionary measure and then boot off the USB drive when the interal one fails. I do this with my iBook and iPod using CCC or SuperDuper!

Of course, your laptop must support booting from USB/Firewire as well.

Had the same problem, solved it with NetTunes, which is a bit clunky for controlling iTunes on my old B&W (maddening for building playlists or anything like that), but it works and allows me to control my music without sitting in front of my desktop. Also allows me to keep my poor little PowBook's 60GB hard drive relatively unencumbered with music.

...but none I completely trust to do a bare-metal restore and give me a bootable system.

I've been pleased with SuperDuper since the start, and now that it's passed a big test I'm even more so.

Just mentioning because it wasn't in your list...

Why authorize/deauthorize when you can simply set up a server and pipe the music over the network? Or put it on your iPod? Or hook it up to your stereo system and use a remote control?

Seems to me that you haven't been looking for a nice, legal solution because you're too busy/lazy to be bothered.