How can I ensure automated back-ups of all my data without manual intervention?
My data lives on a 160GB MacBook internal hard drive, three 500GB external hard drives, and a 500GB network attached storage device (DNS-323).
One of my 3 externals is a 500GB TimeMachine, but it can only hold 2 weeks worth of some of my data. I have to tell it to ignore my music, which is very important to me.
Perhaps this is a stupid idea, but why not swap out the 500 GB time machine hard drive for a 2 TB hard drive? That way, you wouldn't need to exclude your music.
While foolproof is a pretty lofty target, I would recommend sticking with a OSX's Time Machine feature, but replacing your NAS, Time Capsule, and other external drives with an HP MediaSmart Server.
With current drive sizes, you can get 8+ TB of storage in the MediaSmart, and they have full support for Time Machine backups. They're fast, reliable, powerful, and a good value -- certainly a much better option than the Drobo for just about any home storage/NAS scenario I can think of.
There are a lot of other great reasons to go with one of these, too -- see more raves (from me and others) about them in these answers:
You may want to look at a Drobo, and a few cheap terabyte drives. Mac users seem to love those things.
I've heard from Mac users that have used BackBlaze successfully by putting terabytes of data up on the cloud. I couldn't find a way to easily say only backup these folders, which was disappointing. If a disaster happens they will mail you your data instead of having to download it all.
I use a combination of a local backup run nightly and JungleDisk, but for that quantity of data it would be pricey.
There are companies that offers cloud backup and cloud disaster recovery as a service. The best ones are those who keeps an updated version of your data all the time and when a disaster strikes - they immediately take action and replace the data on your site. This way, people who are browsing your data won't feel the downtime/other disasters. Where I work we have this service (we have our most sensitive data online and we can't have a downtime or a disaster without a backup plan). We use Cloudendure and we are very happy with their cloud services.
