[dnanian]

Hey, Staxman. I'm actually quite a fan of MO disks: they're a much better alternative to other 'burned' media, and are unquestionably more stable over the long term. Unfortunately, they haven't been able to scale them up as quickly as DVD media -- as I recall the largest Fujitsu MO is about 2.3GB or so.

Anyway, onto your question. I've actually never had 'cobwebs' clogging on my Macintosh installation that an Archive and Install wasn't able to repair. Windows, sure, gets "Windows Rot" -- and there's no real way to clean it out other than a full reinstall. The Mac, on the other hand, just isn't that bad.

It's much better, in my opinion, to have a full backup on your external drive, if you can afford the space. The killer with a restore is the time it takes. Restoring from a full backup is pretty easy, and with Smart Update actually doing the backup itself is very fast indeed, since most files on your system don't change.

The worst than happens, with a full backup, is that you only restore (as opposed to back up) your user files and 3rd party applications. But remember, applications often have components other than just those stored in the Applications folder. 'Isolating' them is a little harder than you might think...

I'd suggest full (Smart Update -updated) backups. You have options then you don't have with some kind of hybridized approach...