I never gave it much thought when I got my last computer and the cloud was offered X-amount free, so I mainly have family photos and conversations about our pets or other dumb stuff. But when that computer broke, I realized I should have backed up more. I like the suggestions above to get an external drive!
Portable hard drives will also go bad as well. I keep 2 backups of my important data, and in fact, I recently had a 4gb HD that just died after about 3 years, I've just backed it up to a newer drive.
Mark