Offsite backups

Don't keep all your backups in your house. Even if you have a sprinkler system you might get hit by a meteorite or an elephant stampede or something.

REGULARLY (say monthly) move a copy somewhere else.

People propose all sorts of tedious schemes where you are supposed to go to a trusted person's house every week or month and swap hard-drives. Yeah right! How long is that program going to last? Back up online using one of the many services available. There is a lot of silliness about not trusting your data to someone else, but you are pretty safely hidden in the crowd - don't overestimate how interesting your data is :-D

Be realistic about what is gouing to be easy and realibale month after month for years: set up a backup to one of the many sites who are willing to host your data. Some of them even encrypt it for the paranoid amongst you.
Consider one of these:

• Mozy, possibly the most popular. They offer 2GB free. They also have paid version which is $5 per month and you can back up unlimited files, unlimited storage/bandwidth usage. They also encrypt the data. You can also use your own key to encrypt it.
• Crash Plan is notable because you can back up to a "friend's" PC, i.e. to any machine anywhere (else)
• SugarSync
• Assembla - team-oriented
• Clunk Click
• DataTrieve
• Prolifix
• Carbonite
• Jungle Disk
• You probably want to use the more user-friendly front-end systems above rather than sign up directly with Amazon S3

There are others.

If you really won't listen and cannot bear the thought of your data on a "public" site, then your other options are:

• Post it to a relative.
• Keep it at work.
• Upload it or >replicate it with e.g. Microsoft Folder Share to a server somewhere.
• Pay a company to back it up for you

Even if you duplicate your data into another building, it is still worth having a regular offsite backup as well. Do daily backups to a local external hard-drive, and then daily, weekly or monthly backups offsite.