The primary flaw of a system like Time Machine is that it is a local backup. Time Machine could backup your system every minute or you could have a dozen Time Machine drives and it wouldn't help if your whole building burned down.

For a business, this could cause bankruptcy. Imagine if you lost all your accounting data, sales records, or customer data!

I used to work at a printshop doing graphic design and a key part of our business was repeat work: rerunning a form or letterhead or a brochure for a long-time customer with only a few minor changes to the artwork. Well, we had a hard drive die on us and I lost some work that was finished but hadn't been backed up to CD yet. For literally years afterward, we were still paying for that, having to recreate old projects from scratch because the original files were lost, and of course we couldn't charge the customer for that time. That taught us a good lesson about having current backups and having off-site backups: if the printshop had burned down, we'd have lost every customer job. It would have meant an insane amount of rework.

For the average user, this may not be quite so critical as with an on-going business, but sometimes it can be emotionally expensive: can you put a price on the pictures of your children or ancient email correspondence with a now-deceased relative? We do all kinds of things with our computers and a lot of it is deeply personal: losing such data could be disastrous.

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