TM: chances are a good recovery service like DriveSavers could help that gentleman. The data is likely all still there. I hope you'll find a way to pass that on to him.
But yeah, particularly the digital pictures -- offsite backup or DVDs in a safe deposit vault people (in addition to your normal everyday backup). Most "digital" stuff is easily replaceable, but some isn't. Know what's important and keep multiple backups of that stuff.
So if you've read the thread this far and you're thinking "okay, you've convinced me, but what kind of off-site backup can I do?" -- here's a few suggestions:
1. MobileMehttp://www.apple.com/mobileme/. In addition to its many other fine offerings, they give you a decent amount of backup space (20GB) and you can buy more. I find that most people's "really irreplaceable" libraries are pretty small compared to all the easily-replaceable stuff, so for a lot of people 20GB might be plenty. If you buy MM from Amazon or a reputable Ebay seller, it can be a sweet bargain. I've always felt it was a really good deal at any price.
2. For Photos, Flickr Pro is King. If you're primarily interested in backing up personal photos and videos off-site, I might suggest Flickr Pro ($25/year at present) which claims to offer "unlimited" backup of those two formats. Certainly a good deal, but obviously you have to keep paying as you would with MM.
3. Roll Your Own Local Off-Site Backup. With hard drives as cheap as they are now, there's no reason not to make your own "off-site" non-cloud backup by simply filling a spare external drive with valuable data and storing it away from your home. This is obviously for data that isn't going to keep changing (old family photos for example). I've got one sealed in a plastic bag in my storage unit. If you go this route, I recommend taking it home and firing it up once a year to make sure the unit is still functioning of course.
4. Other Cloud Services. There are plenty of them right now and the price is reasonable. Carbonite, BackBlaze, SpiderOak, Mozy, Dropbox and there must be a dozen others. Prices and space and features vary, but I've not run across any that aren't Mac compatible. SpiderOak and Mozy in particular get high marks from my clients, but only you know how much "irreplaceable" stuff needs to be backed up, so depending on your needs other services might work better for you. Most offer free trials or modest amounts of space (2-5GB) for free, so don't be shy about trying them out.
5. DVDs. I'm talking standard single-sided 4.7GB ones here. They're pretty easy to make and very easy to store off-site, and are ideal for the kinds of data that isn't going to change (I use em most often for original movie footage, original unretouched VERY high-rez scans, family photos and other such "archival" material). Yes, you'll be able to read the data back in on whatever machine you're using 10 years from now, but of course nobody can say how much things might change beyond that, so don't store those discs somewhere where you can't get to them again to transfer to the next "permanent" medium format in 20 years' time.
I don't recommend the double-sided or Blu-Ray discs because *as storage mediums* they haven't caught on in the mainstream as single-sided ones did, so they're likely to go "obsolete" sooner, a consideration for 20 years down the line. I can still find a way to play my VHS tapes from the 80s without much trouble, but my Betamax tapes from the same period? Yeah, not so much.
Keep in mind two things:
a. Uploading large quantities of data takes FOREVER!! Most people's upload speeds are anything from 1/10th to 1/50th their download speed. Uploading 100GB of "precious" material to a cloud service is likely to require you keep your Mac on and running (and suffer a drop in internet performance while this is going on) for the better part of a WEEK.
I suggest you pick and choose the REALLY valuable stuff instead of being lazy and uploading everything indiscriminately. Not only will this save you money, it will save you a lot of time, particularly if you need to revise or re-upload things later.
b. There's no law that says you can't have overlapping coverage. I have dual backups right next to me, an off-site HD wrapped in plastic in a storage unit, some DVDs stored elsewhere, and a small amount of precious files on my iDisk as well. Is that overkill? Maybe, but the effort and cost involved are minimal compared to the joy of knowing that I can lay my hands on that stuff if my hard drive and household backups went poof before I could finish this sentence.
Think about what of your digital collection would be impossible to replace, or difficult to replace, and assess your risks -- then invest in some sort of off-site storage accordingly.
