[beggehorn]

Hi Steve (its Ben, not John btw). I've been using Retrospect for all my backups and have been very happy with it. There may be better solutions that do the same things (if not more) but I've got my system down and haven't "shopped around" lately. My favorite features have to be the incremental backup as well as the cataloging Retrospect does in order to prevent copying the same files you already have backed up. I do primarily music production and with careful file management (including trimming empty audio from regions, deleting unused audio and compacting the result) I am able to get each song on no more than 2 cdrs. These are my working backups.
As far as archiving goes, it may very well be wise to make some backups that don't use a proprietary coding scheme (as Retrospect does). From what I understand duplicating a file to a standard data cd will re-write the attributes (including file creation, modification dates) as well as changing the file to "read only". I used data cds for a while and had to write a .bat file which unchecked all the "read only" boxes for all my audio. That combined with making a few fatal mistakes doing manual backups prompted me to go with Retrospect.
Another great feature of Retrospect is verification of the backed up files. After writing the files it will go back and compare the files making sure there are no errors and confirming that it can read the files from the cd. If it catches an error (has happened only a handful of times for me), just run the backup again and it will only grab the file(s) it needs.
Hope this helps, I would love to hear other peoples opinions on their backup solutions as well.