Great idea for a podcast for something so important and so overlooked by many people. The biggest issue I would have about mailing my hard drive is it can be lost, corrupted, etc.. to me it is not worth it. I think the extra hard drive off premises is the best idea. I stick to my bank safety deposit box and it is safe, secure and the best idea I can come up with. Every 3-4 months for the cost of hosting at Amazon you can buy another external drive and have even more redundancy to a reasonable limit. The other concern with going to one of the companies that are not amazon is like what happened to Megaupload where the American feds closed it down and people are panicking over getting their info back and people may have lost everything they had there thinking it was a safe offsite storage solution. The other issue is how long will a company be in business? How financially sound are they now and down the road? Even like you are doing for now keep one or two full back ups at other locations on external drives, to me it is the safest, cheapest and best way. I think cloud computing has its purposes but not for the type of full back most people need. I also think you need to back up all your hard drive just not your photos.