Lightroom Backups

I've been using Adobe's Lightroom 3 for a few months now, and due to my limited laptop hard drive space, I need to start seriously learning backup options. I'm working with JPG / NEF pairs ("side cars" if I have my LR terminology down). A few things I've learned:

• Lightroom keeps all edits and metadata changes in its own catalog stashed somewhere out of sight
• You can choose "Save Metadata" on a folder in LR, which will output in the same folder an XMP file with all the metadata of all images
• Note: this does not save the metadata to the originals in order to avoid file corruptions
• So it's really just a means to move / copy / apply metadata to files via LR's catalog
• There are a series of "Publish" options for sending images to Facebook, Flickr, hard drives, etc. But this feels more like, well, a publishing feature and not a backup feature.

Because I want to backup a folder with edits, metadata, and original files, the proper choice seems to be "Export this Folder as Catalog..." This creates a new folder that contains copies of all the above: edits, metadata, and original files. Once this is done, I send these exported folders for typical backup.