Do you keep a USB drive in a safety deposit box and retrieve it regularly?
Yes. Why don't you? It's not that hard, and a hell of a lot more reliable and secure than cloud storage.
2. Do you have this local cloud poked out to the outside? How do you handle security? Is there a simple web interface that you can get to something when you're away from the house and your personal equipment?
Blah, blah, blah. This isn't the 90s, you know. We do have things like Apache/Nginx with self signed SSL certs these days (not to mention SSH, rsync, VPNs, etc, etc), and it's not that hard to setup (used to be a right of passage for geeks; these days it's considered entrance exam to the equivalent of geek pre-school). Things are also getting better everyday with projects for "personal clouds" (aka, your own file server with a web interface).
1) I'm currently in Istanbul, Turkey, and Turkish is still a work in progress, so getting offsite storage would be a bit of a challenge. When I am back in the states, I find that the best way to forget to backup is to place said backup miles away. For the last decade, my existence has been a bit nomadic, and setting up a safety deposit box has never been in my top to-do list..
And I did have a "local cloud" in the 90s. :) I find it a positive development that I don't have to do it today. I work enough that I would rather trade money for babysitting a box, checking for security updates, fighting incompatibilities with the scripts when an interface changes, and the other administrivia minutia.
I mean, for a personal uses, it probably won't come to haunt you that you're using an old piece of software with a security bug. But at this point, I have no problem paying for the privilege of thinking about other things.
Yes. Why don't you? It's not that hard, and a hell of a lot more reliable and secure than cloud storage.
2. Do you have this local cloud poked out to the outside? How do you handle security? Is there a simple web interface that you can get to something when you're away from the house and your personal equipment?
Blah, blah, blah. This isn't the 90s, you know. We do have things like Apache/Nginx with self signed SSL certs these days (not to mention SSH, rsync, VPNs, etc, etc), and it's not that hard to setup (used to be a right of passage for geeks; these days it's considered entrance exam to the equivalent of geek pre-school). Things are also getting better everyday with projects for "personal clouds" (aka, your own file server with a web interface).