I took this advice back before Leopard came out, and if I had to do it now, I’d do things a little differently.

First, I’d probably just buy an off-the-shelf external drive rather than trying to match the one in my machine and putting it in an enclosure. (By the way, a lot of cheap external enclosures don’t sleep when idle. I found a MacAlly one that does). Either that, or one of the new Time Capsule doohickeys.

Secondly, I’d probably use Amazon S3 to do my off-site backup, and probably do it a little more often than once a month.

Sure, in the event of a catastrophic failure, it’s a bit more work to recover, but the data’s there and hard drives don’t go bad often enough (assuming you’re not one of those idiots that stops them from spinning down) to make that a big deal.