Well there seems to be many ways people do back up and as well as they should - and most will work - cloud backs up are flaky - several people I know have had problems - now local back up are the best in my eye but having an off site for a back-up to the back-ups is not a bad idea - now as far as the media they all have there good points - I never just back up just one way - I have a C drive clone on an ext drive bay - a data Back Up via a byte by byte with no commpression - I all also make a Acrons disk BU (with commpression turned off) and I use Microsoft Synctoy to ext SSD via a plug in ext drive bay - (I got a 60 gig Intel SSD for belive it or not for 50$ on sale) - for Outlook which changes daily (I do a lot of businees via Outlook) - the main point here is to have more back ups than just one and maybe to have one some where else off site - the last words are back back and back up - now back programs can be a pain - if the C drive fails you have to have that program loaded to get your data back and you may not be able to move it to another computer - and don't forget a CD or DVD boot disk made to help you come back up and recover - now for a USB thumb drive they work great but have more than one - and they can be slow on big back ups

Chowhound
Comic Vine
GameFAQs
GameSpot
Giant Bomb
TechRepublic