John: I am interested in your backup plan of attack. I see you use an 11" Mac Air and a portable HD. Is that it? Still happy with it, or do you get 13' lust?
I am looking at the Mac Airs, but I need a big HD. By the time you go for a 500 gig SSD you add another $800.00 to the air. Are you running a smaller SSD and using your portable in unison for extra room, or just as a backup.
What I do is have a big drive in my laptop - 1 terabite, then use time machine to backup onto another large drive that only gets plugged in to the mac and power when I do a backup. I also take the most important files and drag and drop them onto another backup drive.
Rocket_Ronny
Sorry, I missed this. Currently I use TM to back up my laptop to my desktop, and the desktop has an attached drive for TM. "Important" files get occasionally copied to a cheap NAS with rsync. I don't use TM on the music computer, just rsync the music library to the desktop.
The drawback with this system is that I never managed to figure out a good way to keep the working directories on the laptop and desktop in sync. Now it's a mess... So I'm in the process of restructuring my file system so I can use a single machine with a (relatively) small SSD, and larger disks via Thunderbolt. Backups will separate "system" from "data" with CCC for the former and rsync for the latter. I might still keep using TM for wireless backup.
I've realized that the best way to get more storage on my NAS is to trash it and repurpose my old Mac mini as a "file server" with attached FW drives. Don't know why I never thought of that before

Online backup isn't really an option for me, unless I'm very selective about it.