now I'll wait for mix to tell me that I have the brains of a mouse, the intelligence of an earthworm and shouldn't even be permitted to ride a tricycle
Something along those lines.
Although having (relatively) recently returned from a holiday in Cape Town and had an enjoyable time along the Garden Route, Plett and Tsitsi I was temporarily distracted by the mention of the location alongside your name tag. Give it a couple of weeks, now I'm back in civilisation, normal service will resume .....
I've yet to fully decipher the waffle in your post, but a few tidbits for starters :
I really wouldn't buy the sort of huge drive that mix suggests. Yes, it is convenient in a way, but it is a single point of failure and nobody really needs that.
Eggs and baskets old chum, no need to teach granny how to suck them either.
The hint was in the latter part of the post to which you refer, namely :
I'm thinking of buying a few more to replace other older backup disks where I'm running out of capacity.
Remember, RAID (or ZFS if you like) is not the panacea either.... its still a SINGLE logical drive, so you still need backups of that too.
OSX/Mac is smart, you can tell it to use 2 drives for Time Machine
I will give you a sheep **** sized brownie point for that one.
I use that trick too....
one of my destination drives is a RAID array on OS X server
You are not limited to two drives either.
father/ grandfather/son system
Yup, that's good. As is tower of hanoi. As is the simpler "three copies of anything critical (excluding the live copy)"
In my country (South Africa) affordable broadband is horribly slow and the national electricity grid is collapsing,
Yes, your broadband is a turd fest. Fortunately I escaped load-shedding as I was staying in half-decent hotels (not sure if brown envelopes were involved, but the electricity stayed on).
That's all for now Mac the Knife, I might come back in due course and update you with a bigger piece of my mind once I have fully reviewed your ramblings.