I had one of those awful moments last night: I had an external LaCie 1TB hard drive with 20,000+ photos on it (and some movies) attached to my MacBook Pro, when the LaCie failed. I was in the middle of cleaning up my Lightroom catalog, moving things around from my MacBook Pro to the LaCie, when it happened.
I have known it has not been an ideal set up for some time: I have a MacBook Pro with a relatively small solid state drive (256GB), hence having to periodically move things around between the laptop and external USB hard drives.
Thankfully, I have an Apple Time Capsule configured to run auto back-ups. Unfortunately, the external hard drive died just as the Time Capsule was mid-way through a back-up cycle. I have been able to recover the contents of the LaCie drive from the day before when it was last attached, and have copied these to a different external hard drive (it is taking an eternity).
So, upshot is, I don't think I have lost anything: the worst thing is my Lightroom catalog is now a complete mess because the recovered back-up does not reflect all the re-organisation just before the crash. Once all the images are received from the Time Capsule, I expect it will be a nightmare trying to re-link all those folders/image files in the Library, which reflect the changes made, to the recovered but old file structure.
Anyway, it prompted me to finally do what I should have done 6 months ago: I went and ordered a new 27" iMac with a 3TB Fusion drive, firstly, for increased storage and, secondly, to have a large screen to work on.
I also have a 100GB Dropbox account, but have not been making the best use of it because kept running out of space on the MacBook before I could fill Dropbox, so I mainly use for documents. In fact, had just moved some folders out of the Dropbox folder before the crash, so didn't have any backups there. I also have the free Adobe CC cloud storage, but don't really use that. Likewise, I have 20GB Apple Cloud, but I don't use that for photos.
Anyway, it got me wondering what others do about backup. Hard drive or cloud, or both? How many copies? How often? I was lucky this time, but I think I need to improve my recovery strategy.