Re: Fine article.
Not really, if you consider having each time to remember to dig out the drive, connect it, wait for it to mount, run your backup, then disconnect it and put it away again.
Really? When I travel, I use a 2.5" SSD in a USB3 connected case. It has been set up encrypted on the Mac, but as the Mac has that key in its keychain that crypto is transparent to it (backup key in a safe). When I connect, Carbon Copy Cloner spots the drive as part of a failed backup and starts, with a backup process that usually takes somewhere in the region of 5 minutes. Once a week it does a full bore file checksum comparison on anything that's on the disk vs. the source (just in case there's any corruption), and yes, that takes an hour so it requires some planning.
Now, that is my bare metal backup - I can boot and run the machine from that drive. In addition it runs Time Machine, which continues to back up on the hard disk if it cannot see the drive connected. This is wholly automatic, including spooling the local backup to storage once it is in range again of the drive.
I've had my rear end saved a few times through a backup, which is why I run two separate ones, but I also know it's a pain to do, which is why I automated to a point where I can give this to anyone and not be worried they fail to back up. I leave Carbon Copy Cloner to whinge on screen if a backup has been missed, and especially the fact that it's so easy to do and takes little time seems to encourage even the most inept user to do the right thing.
The CCC backup also mounts and unmounts the drive, so the system doesn't see it normally.
On Windows it's a bit more involved, but here I found Acronis True Home to be helpful. It's easy, and combines bare metal recovery with the ability to recover an individual file. However, I must admit that I don't know how strong their backup encryption is. The real sensitive stuff lives in a Truecrypt container although Im looking at full disk crypto. The problem with full disk crypto is that it doesn't work unless the OS is fully powered down (Apple's FileVault has the same issue) and that's hard to teach to a non-tech..