I live laptop-only, and I buy my disks in triples. I do this even with SSDs because they, despite being solid state, are similarly flawed just like their spinning rust kin. Instead, their exhibited failure modes are less electromechanical and more simply "the universe is doing silly things to my data." (See also: solar flares, etc.)
The other two disks get crammed into USB enclosures, and I use rsync to copy data around in a manner very similar to jwz's http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html. With USB 3.0, this is very fast.
That keeps me from experiencing a catastrophic data loss scenario, which is step one. It also solves a work continuity problem wherein I would otherwise be left now with the problem restoring from backups. Here, restoration is literally a matter of swapping disks and rebooting.
Do I actually lose data? Well, yeah, but I've put an upper bound on it that is livable: I lose at most a week because the disk in my drawer at work gets swapped out every Friday for the one I keep at home.
Some caveats: I don't use encryption at the level of my OS's VFS layer (yet), and I don't use RAID. I also don't use non-standard configurations like HFS+ with case sensitivity, btrfs, ZFS, etc.
I keep most sensitive data (think private keys) elsewhere. Those are backed up by way of dumping to hardcopy and storing with my tax information. I can OCR the ASCII-armored representations later if I need to, and it makes choosing a fire safe easy since I don't need one that's rated for digital data storage.
Now, this unfortunately doesn't solve the problem of storing historical copies of things, and I'm trying to find a way to accomplish that sanely without having to resort to alien technology like Plan 9's venti and fossil or vendor lock-in à la Time Machine, or rsyncing to dated directories.