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I have 1 TM backup for my rMBP that will no longer backup. I still have access to the data and can TM back, but I get error messages when it attempts a backup and then the drive becomes unrecognizable. Power down drive, plug it back in, run disk utility and it's fine. Try a TM backup, same error. I've tried trashing the TM pref file but still nothing. I'll take any thoughts on the matter, but that's not what I'm asking about. I have another TM backup for my iMac that is full. Ideally, I'd like to have a 3TB drive, partitioned in 2. Copy existing TM backups, and have drive either hardwired (USB 2) to always on iMac and shared partition to rMBP, or shared via USB 3 on my router. I do also have cloned drives, and use crashplan.

So right now I am running Time Machine on my main computer. Also clone it every Thursday morning. The other thing I do that I think fits into the plan is that I use DropBox. My iTunes and photo libraries aren't there but I do keep all my main documents on there so it's kind of an off site backup. I also use that so I can access things from other Macs, my iPad and iPhone when necessary. I'm getting ready to change over to a MacBook Air as my main machine. It only has 128gig of drive and I'll also be doing a lot of traveling so I thought it might be a good time to rethink my backups. My first problem is that cloning is one drive at time so that would add a couple steps to my cloning if I sue an external drive for iPhoto and iTunes. But that could be done. The second concern is that I'll be traveling a lot more so a Time Machine drive plugged into my machine becomes somewhat impractical. I was thinking about using Carbonite or some other cloud/online service. Any thought there from you folks? I'll probably continue to use Dropbox because it's simple and works. Plus that let's me access things on my iPad or other computers. Any thoughts on how I'm doing this or how you would do it different? Thanks for your input.