I currently use a , to which I have connected two 1.5TB external drives via FireWire 800. One of these drives is my media drive, which houses my very large music collection, some videos, and other media files. The second is a backup drive, with two partitions: one for a clone of my startup volume, and the other for other backups. I also have an AirPort disk connected to my AirPort Extreme, which is available via Wi-Fi for Time Machine backups. Finally, I have a disk dock connected to my Mac mini, in which I place hard drive mechanisms for rotating backups, as I’ll explain below.

The heart of my backup strategy is Time Machine. With its automatic, unobtrusive, hourly backups, I entrust Time Machine with the basic backups of my home folder. I don’t use it for my entire system, because it would take too long, and because I clone my startup volume regularly. In addition, is time-consuming, whereas booting off a clone on an external volume takes seconds.

In Time Machine’s preferences, I have excluded a number of items: not only other volumes connected to my Mac, but also certain folders I don’t want to back up, which are easy to restore.