Crashplan

Checkout www.crashplan.com - it's a relatively cheap way of doing offsite backups that doesn't involve your data sitting off in some nameless datacenter 1000's of miles away.  All you do is get together with one or more friends and buy a couple of external drives; a couple of you then host the drives, and everyone else uses the Crashplan software backs up across the Internet.  What's really sweet is that for the initial backup (which could be many gigs), you can take the drive to your house and seed it locally; this was, the only traffic going over the Internet is just the deltas from the point that you seeded, so hopefully nothing too huge.  Of course, if you're doing a big photo / movie import or something, you can always grab the dive back off your mate and let it sync up locally.

The other nice touch is in the event of a disaster that means you need the backup - rather than waiting several weeks to download it, you can just grab the drive and take it home.

I've been running it for several weeks now, and it seems to be working well.  You have to buy the software, but it's a one-off purchase and it's not megabucks.