I have serious reservations about storing any of my stuff on
somebody else's computer that's Zod-knows-where and who-knows-who
can access it.

You can avoid most privacy issues by encrypting your data before you upload
it.

However, even with high speed broadband, backing up several hundred GB of
data is going to be extremely slow.

It can also be expensive. For the cost of one year of online backups, I can
buy an external hard drive with more capacity and faster backups.

If your internet access goes down, you won't be able to backup your data.
Worse yet, you may not be able to recover a file when you need it.

If the backup company goes out of business, you'll probably lose access to
the data you've backed up.

Most online backups only backup selected folders or files. If your hard
drive fails you'll have to reinstall Windows, your applications, and the
backup program before you can restore your data. With a local backup, you
can simply restore the drive image to a new drive and be up and running
again.

Anthony Watson
www.watsondiy.com
www.mountainsoftware.com