To read the old TM backup, I can recommend *Back-in-Time 2* very highly. Excellent to get something back, to understand how many copies you have. And it is at an excellent price.
http://www.tri-edre.fr/english/backintime.html

In a recent crash, I recovered all my my files, except maybe on or two that haven’t been backed-up yet in the last hour. I trusted it would back-up my Daylite information as well, just to learn Daylite doesn’t play well with it.

As to my Daylite database. Three days of lost work.

MBP, SSD and HDD drives inside . SuperDuper clone and TM backup to a Caldigit VR Mini drive in RAID 0 (for speed as TM is SLOW) with FW 800. Great as I can move it around, as it doesn’t need external power. TM every day, SuperDuper clone every other.

Offsite is Backblaze. Incredibly stable, invisible, and cheap. Unlimited storage for $5 a month. Set to backup at 2 AM each day. Upload speed is great, even from Euroep where I live in.

I’ve only had to recover from catastrophic drive failures a couple of times. I’ve always been paranoid about data loss, so I’ve never found myself in a really bad way. Unfortunately, I’ve known more than a few clients and colleagues that did not share my level of concern.

One important point I would add, though, is that you need to *know* you can recover your data at any time. It’s not enough if all the indicators are spinning; you should be able to grab a file from your history at any moment.

Once upon a time I used Mozy, which seemed okay but had a cumbersome recovery process. I assumed that the data would be fine if I ever needed it, at which point going through the entire process wouldn’t be as bad. Well, one day my hard drive failed, and getting back my data was an ordeal; I had to write my own scripts to cobble together the data and restore file dates from a listing I eventually got them to send me. Even worse, some of the folders seemed to be missing a lot of data; I hadn’t been able to tell because the process (and probably a similar 30-dy policy) obscured it.

Point being, I would only consider using a continuous backup system if it’s ridiculously easy to see what files are backed up, and how to get them back. Otherwise, there’s no way to tell if you can get your data back… until it’s too late.

You can make your Crashplan backup redundant by using their software to backup to online, and other sources such as a external drive or your friends computer. I think this is more than many of the other online backup services can say.

but from the article quoted it’s sounding like people are expecting $5p/m internet based backup to be all they need.

Arq + s3 is just one layer of backup, to protect me from just one type of instance, namely fire or theft.

Even though I backup the newest stuff to the cloud daily I still have local redundancy to a second set of HD’s etc etc

One day, with super fast internet we may be able to get away with only cloud based backups, but at the moment, with TB’s, it’s too expensive and too slow.