I currently have a 1TB external USB hard drive that I use for backups. It's split into two partitions, one is NTFS for general files one is formatted to be a time machine for my mac. I'm not really happy for the obvious reason that this hard drive might fail so I'm looking backup the backup in the cheapest and easiest way possible.
Ideally this would be to get another external and run something that would just mirror the other external when needed. ie I have both externals plugged in and I hit some button somewhere that figures out what's changed on drive A and makes B look like A.