I am giving some consideration to backups etc.
I was hoping to be able to back the whole thing up to the icloud on a regular basis but I gather this is task too far.
Two very strong recommendations.
1. Get an external drive and buy SuperDuper! It is a bullet-proof backup program that does incremental backups, so after the first backup, it is relatively quick. The added valuable benefit is that the backup is a bootable clone of your hard drive, so in the event of an internal disk failure, you can just switch over and boot from your external drive. Ask me how I know and why I recommend it so highly!
2. Cloud backups are easy - for any computer, not just Macs. Subscribe to
http://backblaze.com.It gives you the insurance of an offsite backup. It's completely automatic and works continually in the background. A nice feature is that you can recover any file from anywhere, using their web interface. So if you are away from home, you can still access your files.