I have used local drives for my data for decades. I have data since 1995. Nowadays I also have a remote offline backup somewhere. It seems to work for me so far.
It started with floppy disks in a large box. They actually went bad quite often. From the moment we had a 20MB hard disk[1] for about €400 all went on that hard disk, I think we made copies on the floppy disks just in case (not sure though). It was not important: private stuff, school stuff, programming for fun.
After I got a windows computer, I started hoarding stuff on the harddrive. I don't think I bothered to make copies. When I started doing paid stuff, I bought an external drive for backups. Have been doing that since, in various configurations. My configuration is now: all computers in the house backup to a central server in the house. I rsync to an external HD from that server every now and then. The external HD is stored on a different location.
I have realized that the data is the most vulnerable when I am doing the backup. If the house goes up in flames at that moment, I loose everything. I should get a second HD to prevent that.
