I have been pondering online backup for months now, as my brother suggested it might be a good way to prevent data loss in a crash (like the one I had several months ago with my Seagate drive; crash, update, and resolution), and the high cost of data retrieval afterward.
So, I’ve been idly looking at online storage, and I’m not delighted by this. My problem is that it is usually cheap or free for 2 gig, but anything past that starts to get pricey. Is this really realistic? I have an 80 gig iPod full of music, and that, with only a few more gig of other stuff, would cost me, on average $20/month. I have hundreds of thousands of photos (both of my own work, and then historical photos); for that price, I could burn them to disk and stick them in the fireproof safe, or even a safe deposit box for a fraction of the cost. Heck, I could save them on secure digital cards in the fireproof safe, and still save money.
If I traveled constantly, I could see utilizing a service like Dropbox to backup my files in case – this is their example – I drive my car into a lake with hippos and ruin my laptop. But anything past that seems prohibitively priced.
I think I’m just going to have to rent server space somewhere or just backup my everything to one of my network drives. Either way, I obviously need to budget for a non-cloud related storage solution. I have been enormously lucky that I’ve been able to maintain this much data for this long, but I feel like I’m pushing my luck. As it was, I had a lot a help with the Seagate recovery, and the process took months.
Do any of you, dear readers (all three of you 😉 ) have any suggestions?
Charleen's Chateau 
I’d suggest going with the free Dropbox account for all of your documents and other smaller files. They offer something like 3GB for free these days.
For the photos it really depends how much space they all consume. I suggest going with a cloud storage service even if it costs a bit more than traditional backups. If you backup to a disk at home then if you’re house starts on fire, you lose all your data. If you lock up burnt DVDs then the DVDs could lose your data over time, or if your city had a disaster, you’d lose it all. Amazon S3 is a great solution since they store your data in multiple locations in case of disaster.