Well, I'm glad some people have a use for Apple Backup. However, there are several low cost alternatives for those not using a .Mac account that relieve me of the necessity of resorting to shell scripts. Carbon Copy Cloner was the first reliable OS X backup utility and works properly even in unpaid mode (though I did pay for it eventually). However, while the developer was waiting for Apple to work out some bugs in Tiger I moved on to SuperDuper! It does an excellent job of incremental backups, among other things. It can backup to network volumes and is scriptable. For folder level synchronizations/backups I use SwitchBack, which made the move from OS 9 to OS X early on. There are numerous other shareware backup and synchronization utilities out there, but since the ones I mention have worked well for me I've not felt the need to try the others.
For the kind of catastrophic data loss that faustus67 mentions, a network backup is still pretty limited. Theoretically I could pay for the tens of gigabytes of network storage necessary to backup all my documents, music and image files - and the bandwidth to move them, but it would hardly be cost effective. Dual layer DVDs are an option, but burning them is time consuming - and, at the moment, still expensive. The most efficient and cost effective method of backup is still an external hard drive or two. Placed in a safe deposit box they would certainly be as secure as any network volume and probably more so; though not as stable and permanent as optical media, their relatively low cost and superior ease of use make them a more viable alternative, in my opinion.
For individual, as opposed to corporate users, network storage is adequate for modest amounts of data and is convenient for the traveler who doesn't wish to carry around an external drive - which, after all, is subject to the same kinds of loss and damage that his computer is and, therefore, would hardly be more secure.
As for restoring my system and all my software, that's not a project to be taken lightly. In fact, I've had that problem before when the boot drive on my computer failed. It cost me weeks of productivity and some data I was never able to recover from the drive. It's a far better use of my time and money to backup my whole system, documents, applications and all, on an external drive. After I adopted this strategy, when, once more a drive failed on me, I was back up and running in a matter of minutes. A few more non-urgent hours to bring some applications and utilities back up to date and all was well. And, using a mirror backup, there were no image, compression, encryption or permissions issues to deal with. The biggest problem I had was with some broken aliases that needed to be replaced.
I avoid Retrospect because its proprietary archive format is subject to corruption - I've lost access to backups made with Retrospect and am not inclined to trust it again. That experience also warns me away from some of the other imaging, compression and encryption options. Fortunately I don't have the kind of security issues that make those methods desirable. And Retrospect is far too expensive if all you're going to do is make mirror backups. Others can do that and much else perfectly well for much less.
I know other people have other backup needs and strategies. There is certainly no best or one size fits all solution. Be that as it may, all of us together are still a minority of computer users. We can flatter ourselves that we, who backup, are the wise ones.
Don't anthropomorphize computers -
They hate that.
