Local backups and a few offsite backups, too. Recently paranoia has hit, and I'm planning on storing everything that I hold dear in at least two online locations and two local ones.

This brings up a new question to me. How to decide on the number of and kind of backups?

Before my son was born, I just backed up everything on my local server, as well as one of my webservers. Since a few of my close friends now have children, we all host local backups of each other's photos. We started that after a friend had a house fire and lost all their photos stored on a local server.

I also do a yearly photobook with DVD(s) for my son. The photo book has the best pictures, with the back story for each. The DVD(s) has all our family pictures and videos worth saving for that year. I send out copies to my son's grandparents and great grandparents.

Wow, it's the buddy system for backup! That's a great solution to the psychological barrier: usually, no one but you can tell you to backup your personal data.

I went to a Christian college where everyone was issued laptops, so several of my friends used a special program to share their web histories with "accountability partners." Then they could monitor each other's porn use, ideally to keep them from looking at any porn. Having backup buddies reminds me of that (without the scary religious suppression of natural urges).

In fact, I might be better at making sure my friend shows me photos of his family than making sure I back up my own. Of course, that's one thing cloud computing was supposed to solve in the first place.

The more the merrier, duh.

Stop multiplying the copies when the effort becomes too big.

And because you will by default be lazier than you should be, sit back right now and think of some worst-case scenarios that would screw up the projects you're currently working on, and write down what you need to do to avoid those. Living out the disaster scenario in your head may preempt living it out in reality.

Because right now my backup harddrive broke and my checking account is in the red, my personal lazy backup system for day-to-day important files is Dropbox: http://www.getdropbox.com/

If I'm missing an obvious free solution that doesn't require me dragging folders into Dropbox every day or two, please let me know.

What cloud? She wasn't even paying for the service...

There was a "cloud" in 2005?

The buzzword did not yet exist, but the pattern of keeping stuff online did (even though it was not as popular as now).