Backing up data offline?

i use an external hard drive to copy all my important files. it costs about $100 but it's worth buying especially if you have valuable stuff on your pc. i had to learn it the hard way. we get a lot of thunderstorms where i live and we often lose power during a thunderstorm. it's bad when you have your pc on at that time. once or twice it can take it, but more often than that it will 'bite the dust' like you said and it happened to me once. it cost me over $300 to replace the hard drive, not to mention the lost of data. the technician suggested that i get a battery backup and an external hard drive. i did that and they have saved my life.

I copy everything important onto cd's. I also have a boot disc in case of emergency. You could also have an external hard drive to keep things on. Just update everything once a week and you'll be fine.

burn it to disc - don't ask me how

yea,they have all kinds of backup software you can get,i'm not really happy with "windows backup" programs. there are also storage places online you can upload copies of your hard drive to.most give you 2 GB free.

Several of the ideas you have already received are good options. I back up many of my files to Mozy.com. It is done automatically and only the files I choose to back up are done. Better yet, it is free until you go over a certain amount of storage space. However, I have never needed to use the data yet (thank goodness!), so can't comment on how easy it would be to retrieve the data. Another option for backing up your genealogy program's data (and other things) is Dropbox.com. I love it. The beauty of dropbox is that you can download the dropbox client on to all of your computers and then save files (such as your genealogy data) to dropbox from any of them. You can then access those files from any of those computers! I have dropbox on my home PC, my laptop, and my work computer. Since I have my genealogy data available at any of those sites it is great when I take my laptop out on the road and add data I find to the database. When I next use my PC then updated is there in dropbox ready to be used. In the past I had to remember to use a flash drive to update the other computer, then I would forget which was the most recent data, etc. I also use dropbox when I want to work on documents from my job at home, and vice versa. I think you might find dropbox will solve much of your problem because the data is stored at the dropbox site, so serves as a backup. Dropbox is free up to a certain point, then you can pay for extra storage. I have lots of data in multiple files right now and am still using the free version!