Have a Backup Plan. Regardless of platform

[Hugh-H]

Hello Southsidemusic,

I recognize your confusion at how far you should go to back things up. Some of these folks do a very good job at the old adage "if it's not in 3 places it's not really backed up".
Shipping our systems all over the place for high-profile television shows there is no such thing as downtime. We need two things - backups that allow instant recovery in the event of failure, and easy for the sometimes less-than-stellar operators we come across. Our strategy may work for you -

Two external drives that travel with the workstation, firewire or usb. One is the TimeMachine backup and one is the Carbon Copy Cloner Clone drive. They're both 2.5" drives in external enclosures so they don't take up much space.
If someone installs a plugin or something that causes issues, the TimeMachine backup can get them back. If there is a drive failure as we had a couple of weeks ago, boot from the Clone drive and continue on until the primary can be replaced.

This is a simple plan that gets you going on your backups. Plan the cloning for when the system is in a known good state that you can get back to if there's an issue. We also put images on the server for when the clone drive fails but you can do that later.

Hugh