Best back up for college lap top

We currently have 3 mac computers all connected to external hard drives for the time machine use only. We just purchased a macbook pro for my daughter for college in the fall and are curious on the best back up source for that. The apple consultant sold us the "mobile me" software and told her she can back up most all her needed files on the mobile me account and that would be good. I, being older and having lost valuable info in the past, am not convinced that mobile me is the absolute best thing she can do. Would there be a reason to not connect a laptop to an external "time machine" type drive once a day and use the mobile me account for school files as well?
Additionally would there be a reason to use a smaller "mini" type drive that requires no additional power or would we want a standard A/C plugged in back up drive. Currently we are using all g-technology back up drives and have never had a problem with any of their operation or the time machine operation when we needed to fix a "human" error! I like the small mini type drives, but if it's used basically as a back up for the entire machine anyhow, would it be more beneficial or just simply smaller. I did note that there does not appear to be a kensington lock slot on most of the smaller drives and she is worried about locking things up in her soon to be dorm room.
All you help is very appreciated and please ask me anything if I rambled and didn't make sense!
thanks!

Whether MobileMe is good backup for your daughter is all relative. Off-site backup is the best kind of backup you can have, so in that respect, MobileMe is good. However, there are some major drawbacks. First, it's slow. A large backup might need to run overnight. Second, space is very tight. You've only got 20 GB to share between all MobileMe features (mailboxes, backups, web site, iDisk storage, etc), and since it's shared, you won't want to fill all 20 GB up with backups. My user folder is 51+ GB. Third, you have to use the Backup app, downloaded from the MobileMe iDisk, to perform backups to MobileMe. Backup kinda stinks. There are far better backup apps out there... Backup is just not one I can recommend relying on.
Now, if your daughter's data fits fine and she can schedule large backups for times when it won't get in the way, MobileMe might be a good part of a backup strategy. Keep in mind that she needs to have a couple different backups at a minimum before ditching MobileMe outright.
Another option would be Time Machine with any drive you like. Since she's worried about things getting stolen, maybe make sure she's got a long USB or Firewire cable and can lock the drive up in a drawer or closet while it is still connected to her machine. Or look into a second online backup, like Carbonite.

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