Fellow backup paranoid here. OSX, with three external drives (cheaper than what you would think):

1. bigger drive is the time machine.
2. middle drive is the media storage, only things kept here are either created by me, or things like the iTunes music and video library, bit torrents, etc.
3. smaller drive is the scratch. This is where I dump things like raw video from my camcorder, torrent files that haven't been transcoded, etc.

Photos: offline exports of iPhoto library every X months, depending on activity. The iPhoto library is in the media drive, so it is protected by the Time Machine drive.

Videos: I dump all of my inbound videos, either camcorder originals, bit torrent before transcoding, etc. into an external drive that I use as a scratch drive. Edited videos go to a different drive for archival. The best goes to either Youtube and/or Vimeo, so odds of losing these are basically nil. Time Machine backs up the local store with the edited videos. Encoding takes so long that I am seriously considering dumping those into DVD too.

Transcoded video also goes to a different drive that is protected by a separate Time Machine drive. I used to keep these in the same drive I use as Time Machine, which was monumentally stupid. Mac users: leave the Time Machine drives alone! If the time machine drive dies and you are OK, all you lose are backups. But if you use that drive as storage too, then you are in trouble. Lots of it.

Files: This is my weak spot, my only backups are in Time Machine. Files that are not used a lot are in the media drive instead of the main drive in my mac book pro, this keeps the main backups of my home folder a little smaller.

Windows: I am a mac user working for a microsoft-centric company, so all of my web programming is done from within Parallels Desktop 4, running XP Pro. If I use Time Machine to protect Parallels, I get ONE file that is about 80GB and is almost useless. The solution is simple: don't backup Parallels.

Instead I use Microsoft backup to do idle backups of my critical folders in Windows. In my case all of my work is centered in three folders, so I have three separate backup jobs that run whenever Windows has been idle for more than 10 minutes. The backups are written to a folder in my media drive, which is protected by Time Machine. Whatever work I do that is not in these three folders is in a source control repository remotely, so in practice, if my XP dies, all I lose is the time needed to create a new XP workstation from scratch, then copy back my backups and reconnect to my source control repository.

"Life-or-death critical files that will be the end of the world as we know it if I lose them"

This is the special category. Whenever I can, I keep those online. It could be a zip mailed to myself at Gmail, or kept in a Google doc, etc. If critical enough, then PGP it first.

I just had a friend lose EVERYTHING because of a hard drive platter crash on a 6-month old Dell laptop. That's 6 months of school pictures, and a new book in progress. She never ran backups because she claims to be always too busy to do it. The end result? Irreplaceable loss, plus the $400 she paid for a data recovery service just to tell her that no data could be recovered.

My worst file loss in maybe 5 years was about a month ago: my parallels desktop died, and I couldn't recover from backups. The loss? a folder with a bunch of handly script bits, everything else was safe in a code repository.

I did not lose a single customer file.

I still lost two days of work, but that's because I had a ton of crap to reinstall, not because I lost real work files.

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