As you say:
Other backup media are either specialized and are not easily accessible for desktop end users. Online backup is impractical even with high-speed internet connections and carries some obvious privacy and security risks, while local network backups require some kind of quality archival media already in place.

I’d actually think you’d find rsync.net does solve your problem there. Geo-redundancy if you’re really paranoid? In general a company doing this knows how to deal with backups and you can be assured of their safety.

As for privacy and security, a quick skim through their TOS will show you where their priorities lie. It even goes so far to offer a canary report system. Note that you can encrypt your data and all secure protocols are supported.

As for the whole “uploading” cost, if you’re on an unlimited bandwidth connection this should be no problem – every night tell it to upload, and within a week at most you’ll have it online. The incremental uploads take no time at all.

The only question is if you’re willing to take out your wallet :)

Having said that, I don’t believe in nuking files mercilessly especially if I’ve created them and they represent some form of creative work.

Programs, yes. They can be restored. Some files are irreplaceable. Disk space is cheap though.

I am waiting for mass storage solid state devices.

I’m rather thrifty with my filespace, I believe the ultimate destiny of any file on any computer is to be deleted >:) For this reason I don’t archive emails, I mercilessly nuke anything I haven’t touched for a good couple years, and my favourite application is Filelight, which tells me which directory I should target next. The fortunate side effect of this is that I can afford to leave my computer uploading for 2.5 days straight to up my 6-7GB worth of to-be-nuked data.

If 100GB were cheap online, I wouldn’t mind leaving my computer on a 4-week long upload when I sleep. After that incrementally it should be a breeze to maintain.

1. I love to have physical access to the media of storage to my personal files and don’t feel comfortable that it exists somewhere halfway across the globe in a remote server.

2. I have almost 100 GB of data that is valuable enough to back up and I simply couldn’t back up so much (even 1 GB is daunting with a 64 kbps DSL connection) even if I wanted to.

Having said that, I would have to consider getting a more reliable storage media than an external USB hard drive. I wish solid-state storage came in bigger capacities as they seem to be more reliable.