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Since 2007, I've just been using two 4-drive RAID-5 arrays for archiving with a couple additional high-capacity JBOD HDDs for recent storage. Every few years I then do staggered upgrades which often at least double storage for lower cost than I bought the previous HDDs for. Drives formerly in RAID get re-purposed into external enclosures. In general, I've never found doing backups of downloaded stuff as cost efficient, considering most could be re-acquired with a bit of time and effort. Protection against a sudden single-drive failure taking out all my data is all I feel I need at the moment, and my small RAID-5 arrays have worked well enough for that purpose.
Sometime in the future, I could see myself begin using a combination of services like Backblaze ($3.96/month unlimited storage backup single computer, active local data only) and Bitcasa (free in Alpha/Beta, afterwords $10/month unlimited storage multiple computers, active+inactive+deleted local & external data, folder sharing with other users, streaming, w/ access via mounted virtual filesystem or web portal) so I don't need to endlessly expand my local storage and would actually have an off-site backup. I've yet to jump on any such 'cloud backup/storage' service, since when I've considered the cost/benefit of doing so in the past, I often found it would cheaper to just buy HDDs (or use former-RAID drives) and backup myself if needed. Though after prices come down and I migrate to 4TB drives, I'll likely hit my breaking point and embrace one of these unlimited cloud services.
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