Backup Strategy for new Mac Mini User

[Matt]

Hi...

As I am now into my 3rd day as a mac owner...I have been looking for a backup strategy/software as my mini is to be the hub of my photo/mp3 libraries.

I have the mini with the 80 gb harddisk..which currently has about 20GB of mp3s on it. So i had a couple of questions about SD which I hope you can help with.

So my initial plan is to buy a external firewire drive.. probably a 160gb. Partition the drive into 2 sections, one 80GB one for complete backups and another for the sandbox.

So eventually after following the manual I should be booting from the sandbox on the external drive and sharing various items on the host drive. How can I find out which areas are shared and which are not ? I presume directories like music/photos/movies are left as shared?

For applications are all non apple apps then just shortcuts back to the main drive ? If you drag a shortcut to the trashcan on the sandbox..are you just deleting the shortcut or wil it try to uninstall the app ?

When running aliased apps are they using the system area of the sandbox or the main drive.. I am a bit confused as to the domain of the shared apps when they run. Are areas like the library considered shared or copied.

Also if I create new directories like magazines within my home area are they picked up as shared data or would I have to customize the scripts to include exclude those ?

Hope that ramble makes sense.. my last question was whether there would be any issue with using 2 firewire drives and for example "SoftRAID" to set a mirror which I could then partition and use superduper for a backup and sandbox, thereby doubling my redundancy?

Looking forward to trying this out

Cheers

Matt