We used to use Floppy Discs to store our precious files, then hard drives, USB sticks, memory cards, these are all useful devices for storing our precious data. Personally I like to be sure I'm backed-up. I learnt the hard way, losing precious work and no back-up to recover the data. All hard drives will fail eventally. There really is no excuse now. There are so many useful services to help us while being secure at the same time. Easily my favourite is Dropbox, but I often explore the others and considering that most services use a business model that has a free entry facility, it's good to use a few and benefit from not having to pay. Some other services worth considering are, ZumoDrive, SugarSync and Microsoft’s SkyDrive with a whopping amount of Free storage.