I'm surprised that a computer science professor didn't have a better method for backups. It seems common sense to me that you should have at a very minimum: -

I'm surprised that a computer science professor didn't have a better method for backups. It seems common sense to me that you should have at a very minimum: - Continuous onsite backup onto a different physical device (e.g. Time Machine on ext. HDD) - Weekly or monthly backups onto a different physical device kept offsite (e.g. ext. HDD in a safe deposit box) - Continuous cloud-based backup (e.g. Backblaze, Mozy, etc.) I personally use Backblaze as a last resort, in case my laptop HDD fails and something happens to my Time Machine backups. The probability of this is so low, if it happens I'll be happy to pay $200 for them to send me a hard drive. Also, IMHO it seems ridiculous to me to expect restoring tens of GB over HTTP to work flawlessly. One of the reasons I chose Backblaze is that they have the ability to physically send me my data. Web restore is for the files you can't live without until the package from Backblaze arrives. (formatting edits)