I was reading a piece on Leopard the other day over at Ars Technica and I was dumb-struck by a survey that Apple apparently took among its customers before creating Time Machine. Apparently only four percent backup regularly:

Apple took a survey of its customers’ backup habits before creating Time Machine. Eighty percent of Mac users said they knew they should backup their data. (This is scary already. Only 80 percent?) Twenty-six percent said they do backup their data. That actually doesn’t sound too bad until you get to the next question. Only four percent backup regularly.

I realized just now that I’ve been pretty lucky that I do a backup every two weeks (or whenever I’m at home), to a networked drive at my place. This is meant to make any data survive that’s not in our version control system. I actually needed the backup desperately a short while ago, as I had to switch to a new laptop without having access to the old one all of a sudden anymore.

The story is that Time Machine takes away all the hassle of doing backups manually and completely and transparently automates the process. As Ars Technica puts it:

If you have more than one hard disk attached to your Mac, it’s more difficult not to use Time Machine than to use it.

I do have to change my setup a little bit though. I heard it’s possible to first connect a networked NAS drive via USB and initialize it as a Time Machine drive, after which (if the NAS supports AFP) you can reconnect to it through the network and Time Machine will still work. That’s suboptimal though, as I want to change to a RAID setup anyway. I’m going to buy a Firewire RAID drive soon that will serve as my Time Machine drive. The networked drive that I already have (a Lacie too) will continue to serve as my music drive (I don’t have backups of my music, maybe I’ll use the RAID drive for that too).

If you have any suggestions (different drives, different setup), let me know!