I have met a lot of people who, when asked about their backup preparedness, shrug the question off saying, “Well, i backup to an external hard drive.”  Increasingly, folks buy the external drives and home NAS products that are designed to assist with backups (like the Apple TimeMachine).  HOWEVER, backing up to a single, local hard drive is not really backing up…it is making a second copy.  Consider what might happen if your external drive were to fail?  Or, even worse, if you had a disaster, like a fire, that charred your home computer and that external drive?!

As if to underscore this point, thousands of users have had issues with their Apple TimeMachines.  The devices themselves suffer from (typical) Apple heat issues (some folks out there have suggested that aesthetics are ranked about all else, and that has been cited as the reason for the lap-scorching properties of many generations of MacBook Pros). Well, CPUs, Power Supplies and Hard Drives hate heat, and tend to fail when operated outside of their normal range.  Initially Apple rejected warranty claims unless the user had applecare on their computer as well, but they have since extended the warranty to replace these failed TimeMachines.  But replacement doesn’t get you your data, and so this really illustrates the value of having more than one method of backup.  And I, of course, would recommend that at least 1 of those methods should be offsite!

Some interesting links:
http://appletimecapsule.me/
http://timecapsuledead.org/
What’s killing Apple’s Time Capsules after 18 months?