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Hi Annette,
I'm old enough to have seen friends and relatives in tears after a HDD failed - and they had no backup. It's bad enough when it's the night before a school assignment is due. It's worse when it's your PhD thesis. Or entire collection of rare vinyl albums and CDs that will never appear digitally are gone. Worst of all are the wedding album, family pics and videos which are irreplaceable.
A mac household here. We have an iMac with external HDD attached via USB with time machine backing up everything on that. I use two external hdds which I swap weekly; the alternate one is kept in a basement storage cage.
The iMac is on 24 x 7 set so the display sleeps but the CPU does not as it is a media server for our Apple TV (music, photos and videos). I run OS X Server on the iMac partly so that it can act as a server and backup via the home wifi network for the other devices:
- a MacBook Air which backs up via its time machine to the iMac via wifi, whenever the MacBook is at home;
- a windows laptop (wife's) that also backs up to the iMac, roughly daily;
- two iPhones and an iPad or two all set to sync to the iMac via wifi.
The setup has been put to the test a few times:
- I've deliberately tried restoring from the time machine backup to a spare drive to confirm it works;
- after installing an SSD in the iMac and setup it up as a fusion drive, restored everything from the backup;
- after wife's iPhone was broken recently, the first question at Apple was "is it backed up ?" before they replaced the handset. Restoring from the backup (via iTunes) worked perfectly.
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