Yet another FileVault Question

[bdahm]

After reading through this entire thread my head is spinning. I have two goals for my backup and based on what I have been reading they may be contradictory. If not, please enlighten me.

First and foremost, I want to protect against a catastrophic hard disk failure on my iBook. Along with this go lesser emergencies when I might want to restore the system to a previous state.

Secondly, since I am backing up to an external firewire hard drive, I would like to know that that data is secure should that hard drive itself by stolen.

One question that comes to mind is whether a File Vault file stored as a sparse image is bootable? I get a sense that it isn't. Right now I am not using File Vault, but was considering doing so. The other issue is my understanding that a smart backup of File Vault will take some time because the entire sparse image file will have to be backed up even if only few files have been changed since the last backup.

Please feel free to comment on these issues.

-Bill