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I mirror my drives once every two weeks on external drives of similar capacities or bigger and shelf them. I use Acronis true image. When my drives fail, and they always do eventually, out of the blue, no amount of monitoring will prevent it, I'm always in the position to do a bare metal restore.
So I go and buy a blank drive, stick it in the machine, boot from a CD then restore the image from the backup in a base connected via an eSata port. Takes about 15min, then unplug the dock and reboot. Done.
Online, for all my servers, I don't have the luxury of downtime, so all boxes have two drives that mirror in realtime. If one fails it takes 5min to boot again from the second drive as a master then do a hot swap for the bad drive and resync on the fly.
I don't believe in file by file backup. It is useless. Cloning or imaging sector by sector is the only reliable way.
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