I always struggled with backups. I manually used to copy my data all over the place, and the only automated backup technique I implemented on a Mac was Time
Machine. But that had positives (was natvely built in and supported by the OS and more importantly, when doing a bare-metal restore), and negatives (I didn't always trust it, it requires more disk space than what you're backup up and it is physically next to your device; a fire would take both out).
And of course, it isn't cross-platform. Not an issue in my household, but it might be in yours.
I have "talked" about Dropbox before, but its too expensive when you're planning to backup 500GB or so of data (yes, my pics and music is that big). I always struggled with what to use, and then came across two excellent services; Mozy.Com and CrashPlan. I ended up using CrashPlan primarily because
- it supports machine to machine backups (you don't need to buy the cloud service)
- its cheaper when you have multiple systems
I've got it seutp and am banging away at cloud and machine-to-machine backups. Lets see how it goes! But so far, very impressed with the tech and the concept.
