I think I'll look at what you've said, because local backups are obviously significantly quicker to restore. Maybe for absolute essentials. I used to backup locally, but rather than having a backup drive, as such, I backed up bits across various other drives.

True. I've had to recover from many a dead hdd, no fires/floods/nukes thus far (though I can see nukes from my balcony and we get plenty o' floods, none have reached the 13th floor, thus far).

We use carbonite for most stuff for windows computers.  I still need to do something off site for linux mint ones.

I have considered renting a bank box and putting a monthly back up in there.

What is the best back up service to keep documents.