Backing up your PC - how do you do it?

[jillandhersprite]

So its time to upgrade my cronky 10-15 year old desktop PC...
Its a Hewlett Packard and had an inbuilt detachable hard drive - so every few months I would copy over my documents and photos to the hard drive and generally keep it in a different part of the house. I know everyone seems to use some kind of cloud backup these days - my phone is always trying to do it...
So would love to know what do you do? And what would be worth considering as I start the painful process of trying to buy a new PC!

Everything except the toaster is backed up to the Microsoft cloud - phone, tablet, Surface, desktop. I'm working on the toaster, but it won't co-operate. It's instant - create a photo or a file anywhere and it's on the cloud in seconds.

I use a NAS box (external stand-alone hard drive) which holds my PC's daily backups. I also have an internal hard drive which is a mirror image of my PC's hard drive (including operating system) which is also used as backup. It means if the main drive fails I can simply switch drives and carry on working
Finally I have a plug-in USB hard drive which I manually update once a week. I'm totally reliant on my computer so I'm quite vigilant about backing up

Thankyou - just realised I never responded...
I like your approach species - for some reason I am hugely uncomfortable with the idea of a cloud even though I can see how it could be much easier...
New pc should be arriving next week - i've got a lot of work to do!!!

You can always get an external case, put your current hard drive in it and voila - instant backup. Though to be honest given the ... maturity of your machine I suspect a new backup drive would be a better solution.
Even though you have a backup on your removable device I would probably still get a 128gb memory stick or two and copy stuff to that as well before doing anything else - just in case!

128gb Kinston stick for about £12 tinyurl.com/uf8ramnt