Hardware troubles continue. My Time Machine disk is making I/O errors. I'll get a new 1 TB drive (just the drive, now that I have the toaster), but I also signed up for a trial account with online backup service Backblaze. 5 dollars a month for unlimited backup seems very affordable. Unfortunately, it will have to be in addition to a local backup, because the transfer speeds over the Internet are just not comparable to what you get from USB2 or Firewire: I am told my initial upload of 69 GB in 321 thousand files will take 33 days. After that it will be continous incremental backups. If I ever need to restore, there is a web interface where I can download my files, or they can send the data on a 160 GB USB drive (USD 189).