Need for new backup-plan

Tuesday we had unwanted visitors in our flat during daytime. When we arrived home from work (yes, normal people work for their money and don't go out for a robbing spree), we found out that our apartment was a target of an organized burglary in the city. Many things like jewels, clothes, electronics and last but not least my laptop were stolen. That morning I unfortunately didn't take my laptop to work because I have a desktop computer at my disposal for my job at the client.

I keep my laptop always close to the laptop-bag where the extra stuff is in : power cable, cordless mouse, paperwork, USB harddrive, ... The USB harddrive is primarily used for taking backups once in a while and for transferring data to other computers. It must have been more than a month that my last backup was taken, but I was still very lucky (can I use the word lucky in this context?) that they left the bag - including my USB harddisk - in my apartment.

Why do people take backups most of the time? Because of the chance of disk-failures, not to foresee a possible burglary I would think! All my backup-work would have been worthless if they had also stolen my USB harddrive. All this let's me think about a new backup-plan for the future! It would be a better idea to keep my backups in a complete other physical location than my laptop. Also in case of a fire, you would lose it all if those things were kept together. What about online storage? Is that a solution for storing your backups? Anyone some ideas about a secure backup-plan?

I mustn't tell you that it's really frustrating to lose a lot of important data/work. My article for .NET Magazine that was under construction is gone, presentations I was preparing, some important emails, personal stuff, ... I don't want to see that happen again! This week-end I will start re-installing my new laptop, but that will be only phase 1 of my re-work!