As an IT guy who designs DR (just a part of what I do) for a living and like I said earlier in this thread a working copy on site, a back up on site and a backup offsite and in many locations as possible is the safest bet.
I never told anyone to use the cloud as a single backup method. Tape is a poor backup solution for long term, as are DVD's but for different reasons. DVD's tend to get scratched or wear out, tapes no one has that model tape drive 10 years later and they are not backwards compatible. Single external hard drives die all the time.
Keep you data yourself, on a NAS. Use the cloud as a backup to that. Very easy to manage and very hard to kill.
Print is a bad idea for archival, I'm happy MSP's photos are around. a lot of people's aren't: fires, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, burglars, or just getting lost have claimed lots of photos. They also take lots of room and are hard to move about and organize. This may work as a last ditch backup of very important family photos.
People telling you to keep backups in bank boxes or at parents houses tend to live close by, no geographic dispersion. that big earthquake/flood/fire may very well hit them too.
do not rely on Teh Cloud, in any form. If you don't have physical control over your data, you don't own it, and whoever does own it can do anything they want to it and you've got very little recourse. That could include deleting it, peeking inside it, or even sharing it with the world.
Disk(s) 1 are where you keep everything. Put a copy of everything on disk(s) 2. Every week (or month or whatever), take disk(s) 2 offsite to your bank deposit vault or your parent's place or somewhere you trust and exchange it for disk(s) 3, which you bring back with you and start treating as you used to do with disk(s) 2. The next week, do the swap again.
But you only want to think about RAID if a single disk isn't big and / or fast enough to hold all your stuff, and you should then think of the RAID array as a single disk that happens to have some extra moving parts.
...and the only reason you'd need an offsite backup is if you're worried about theft.
The Cloud, read the TOS for the provider and make sure it fits your needs. don't make the cloud (or anything) your single backup source.
The disk swap is a ton of work, hopefully the last backups were good and hopefully the disk didn't fail. when you fill up one disk you get to buy 3 more. don't do this.
RAID (other than 0-1) also protects against hardware failure with an extra hot spare (5/6) or array (10/50). A NAS also doesn't have to be a single drive, the space can be logically separated.
or any other natural disaster.
