Recommendation on Applecare and Backup Options

Hi All,

I've been following a lot of discussions here on the Mac forum - all very interesting and informative. I appreciate all the experience and advice given. I've decided on soon getting a 15-inch Macbook Pro w/ Retina, 2.3 GHz, 256 GB with 16 GB memory. I'm able to get an 8% discount through my employer versus regular Apple prices. My principal use will be processing astro-images.

I'm sure that this question has been asked before. But haven't seen a recent discussion. In any case I'm curious how many of you would recommend Applecare for my purchase. This will be my first Mac, so OS will be new. Also this Mac model being "difficult" to repair is a concern as well.

A second question is about backup options. I'm just coming off of an (external) hard drive failure on my XP laptop. So I'm very aware of the need to have backups on multiple drives. Time machine sounds like a great backup solution. I'm considering getting a Buffalo DriveStation Duo USB 3.0 RAID 2 TB. Here's the question. What's your experience with that Brand's reliability? The price from B&H is $189. So it seems rather inexpensive in comparison with other vendors.

Thanks for any help you can give.

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Best Regards,
Russ