Since finally building my own home machine (instead of just relying on a laptop from work after selling my Macbook), I have spent a bit of time coming up with a backup process. In my new machine, I have two 640GB SATA drives in a RAID 1, so that gives me performance and the redundancy of a mirror. I highly recommend it for at least your system drive (where your OS and software resides). I also have a 500GB SATA drive for use as a storage drive (pics, movies, software, etc). The storage drive is probably more important than anything since I have all my pics and archived documents and such on it, so this gets backed up to two places.
The first place is to a second set of 500GB drives in a Firewire enclosure, one drive for a mirror, the other for drive images of the system drive. To do the mirroring, I use a program called Mirror Folder, which I have had forever. It does folder watching and either real-time sycning, or scheduled syncing between a source and destination. Everything on the storage drive gets mirrored every two hours to one of the Firewire drives. In addition to this, I use Acronis True Image 2009 to make an image of my system partition (the dual 640GB drives) twice a month that is stored on the second Firewire drive. This way, if the house is burning down, I just grab the Firewire drive and run. This will give me a usable image of my system, as well as a backup of all of my archived data.
If that fails, I have a secondary backup using IDrive online backup service. Every night I have a set of watched folders (the most important stuff) backed up to their service online that I can restore to any machine, and access via their website if I ever need to. They also keep revisions of files as they change, letting me roll back if I botch something horribly. It will not restore my whole machine or anything, but it gives me piece of mind knowing my most important data is backed up somewhere offsite. It came down between Carbonite and IDrive and I ended up choosing IDrive for its better usability both online and via its desktop application. It’s not unlimited space like Carbonite, but I’m not using all of the space anyway, so no big deal.
Now, this is just my backup process for worst case disaster scenarios. For daily syncing/sharing of files between the multitude of computers that I use, I primarily use DropBox to sync files, and LiveDrive for online sharing and storing of random stuff. I recently switched from ZumoDrive to LiveDrive because they allow uploads within their web interface. My other reason for switching was since I was part of their beta, they offered me a one year unlimited account for half off. I figured I would give it a shot and let everyone else catch up and re-evaluate them all at the end of the year. I am a HUGE fan of DropBox, so hopefully by then, they will have a few more key features added so I can rely just on them (and better pricing).
So there you have it. 