If we want to start talking about backup schemes... you should have multiple, each for a different purpose.
I have my desktop in the office with a boot drive, and my archive. The archive is a 2.1TB RAID5 and houses all of my photography/business related items. The boot drive of the computer does get my personal documents, but it is backed-up nightly using Retrospect to my 1TB RAID0. I also have a 480GB RAID0 for misc stuff (mp3's, movies, etc.) which is backed-up to the backup RAID.
RAIDs (other than 0 or striping) are great for protection from drive failures... but it doesn't remove the issues of getting a virus that wipes things on the drives out, a corrupt resource fork, user error (ie deleting files), etc.. One thing that is nice about building the system for a Mac is that I have a lower risk of viri issues.
To help prevent the loss of a file because of a computer/virus/user related error, as well as theft or fire, I burn all of my photos from the archive onto DVDs for off-site storage. In addition to drives, you always want to have a physical back-up (DVD, etc.) that can be stored off-site incase of fire/theift.
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I have discovered that some of my older cheap CDs I have burned are not very good for archiving and some of the picture files are now corrupt
It is also a good idea to transition all the info to the latest media over time. Not only does the media break down and technology improves (and other formats will disappear... remember the floppy?). Yes, it takes time to do it, but as the media gets larger (CDs at 700MB -> DVDs at 4/8GB) it takes less time.
-Todd...
