DuckSouth.com

In the past week I have had two different friends come to me in a panic about losing everything on their home system. People spend a little money and get a reputable offsite backup of your data. Unless you have a ton of data this doesn't cost you much per year. Use either of these two, Mozy preferred by our company. There are a multitude of other good options as well. Chump change per month to keep your stuff safe.

http://mozy.com/product/mozy/personal
http://www.carbonite.com/backup/pricing-plans/personal-plans

In addition to offsite buy an external USB hard drive and use Time Machine on a Mac or the builtin Windows Backup to do disk to disk backups of your systems. These are both super simple to setup.

Time Machine setup http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427
Windows Backup http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/set-change-automatic-backup-settings#1TC=windows-7

I keep all photos and videos backed up on a 1TB external hard drive on about a quarterly basis. It would suck to lose 10 years worth of photos.

mine is going to the shop today. Pictures on it from the last 10 yrs. I am hoping for the best. I will definitely do this when it returns.

You don't want to have to use these guys, it's pricey. But i have for work in the past with good results.
http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/

I had an external disk of nothing but music crash (500gig or music ~ 30K songs) and they quoted me $500 to recover it.

Or you can always just store everything in cloud for the cost of a 12 pack each month. Dropbox just increased their storage for $9.99 a month from 100 GB to 1 TB.

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/dropboxs-plan-to-stay-relevant/

I use carbonite. They have a mobile app that I can use to access my pc if need be

I'm listening now! And thank you Ronnie!

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I need to subscribe to a PC backup plan. Is there any new info to add to the posts below? Are Mozy and Carbonite still good choices? Thanks in advance.

Yeah, if it's mechanical it's bound to fail eventually. Then there is always the risk of fire etc...

I backup to an external drive as well as a storage PC, then offsite.