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I absolutely do agree that time machinen is a great option. Why I think a second backup as a mirror image or bootable copy is essential is that in the event of a complete hard drive failure on your Mac you can boot from this external drive and continue using your computer as before until you get the damaged drive replaced. You can't boot from a time machine drive.
If this backup drive is stored remotely it makes no difference whether you use super duper or time machine. This is because you have to bring the drive on site and physically connect the drive to update the date before once again taking it off site for safety. The currency of the data is the same with either process. The big difference is that you can boot from a mirror image drive but not from a time machine drive. If your Mac is being used for work this could be a big advantage.
In any case it all boils down to how paranoid you are about loosing your data. For me if I loose some correspondence or the like who cares but if I lost my family photos it would be a disaster. This is why I think you need at least 2 backups with one being off site.
Best of luck with it.
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I find the second back up off site a bit problematic. Unless you are religiously rotating between local and offsite backups on a weekly basis you are setting yourself up for disaster when you actually need to recover data.
It's worth looking at online backup if you have a broadband plan with a healthy monthly data allowance. While it doesn't replace a local backup it can be pretty useful for backing up stuff you really can't afford to lose.
It's worth considering using a product like Crashplan if you want a high level of data protection.
https://www.crashplan.com/consumer/au/store.vtl
A comprehensive solution would be to use the backup to disk option to send a full back up to the company to avoid huge data charges. You'd then do incremental backups to keep the backup up to date.
If you actually suffer a total data loss you can have a full copy of the backup courier to you.
The most attractive aspect is it largely eliminates the human as a factor in data backup. And I reckon if you are relying on a human to ensure data is backed up regularly and taken off site, there is a high degree of probability that when I matters the human will have be found to have failed.
cheers
Paul
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Thanks all. some food for thought here....
Now twin monitors for Mac, whats my options......
