Apple Users

I had a couple crashes where I would have lost everything if I had not backed up to Time Machine. I had a couple times where OS X had gotten so badly corrupted that I had to wipe and reinstall. Each time my data loss was minimal due to having Time Machine backups.

Also Time Machine is very useful when migrating from one machine to a new one. Just plug in time machine and it will copy everything you want over.

I'm not sure if the other boot drives will work and it would take some hitting up of the googles to be sure. I think with multi-partition drives it will only back up a single partition. But I'm not sure and would recommend doing research on that.

Time machine is only part of my backup strategy. Due to the limited size of Mac hard disks these past few years I bought a custom built PC in 2015 with a 2tb drive and put a copy of Ubuntu on it (I did that as they only included the OS if one specifically asked for it). It works well as a file server I copy things over to that server which I back up to a local external hard disk and also back up via CrashPlan to the cloud. Even though CrashPlan is officially for business I use them because they support backing up from Linux devices where Carbonite's consumer solution does not.

As cheap as external drives are now I don't think there's any reason not to backup devices.

(I work in IT and I remember the days when a 3gb drive took up a full server cabinet worth of space).