I bought an expensive brand name one that had a two year warranty and it quit after 18 months. It was replaced and that went another 18 months. I buy the cheap ones now.

Online backups might be ok if you don't have much data, I have years of pictures, bank records, etc.
Time to restore is also an issue, espically if you had to bug out like people in NOLA. If I were to bug out to the farm I'd be trying to restore across a 24-36k dial up.

I burn dvd's currently, just sent a set down with my parents, it took 5 dvd's just for all my pictures. I'm burning single layer because I don't have any dual layer drives except the burner.

I still keep some of my most important files on flash, I've switched over to microsd because my phone and gps use it. So I found a small usb microsd reader that was the same size as a flash drive and replaced my flash drive with it. As I buy newer bigger cards for either the phone or gps I put the old into backup rotation.