Secured online backup probably may best way.
Call me a luddite- I want the CPU, the software,
and the storage, sitting in front of me

The problem with online backups is you don't always have access to the
internet. In fact, my connection went down for about 5 hours yesterday.
Rare, but it happens. If I needed to recover a file I would be out of luck
until the connection resumes.

Also, if you have a complete drive failure and need to rebuild, you
wouldn't be able to access the net to restore your backup. With a local
image backup on an external drive I can restore quickly and easily.

there truly is nothing on this spindle I can't live without.

Even if you don't keep personal records, music, video, photos, etc., you
still have many personal settings, bookmarks, and whatnot that are a major
hassle to reconfigure when things go wrong.

anything important I burn a CD anyway.

CDR's (and DVDR's) are notoriously unreliable for long term storage. I
have had so many disks fail on me after relatively short storage (less than
a year) that I gave up on them years ago. I only use CD/DVD's for quick
storage such as mailing a disk to others.

A USB flash drive will give you more storage, in less space, and is
reusable. But, the long term storage is uncertain also.

I personally use two external 1TB USB hard drives to make full image
backups of my hard drive at least once a week. I keep one in my desk for
quickly recovering from simple accidents, then swap it once a month or so
with the second drive I keep in my safe deposit box at the bank.

Anthony Watson
Mountain Software
www.mountain-software.com