Being an IT Professional, I'm sure you frequently get to "help out" your less IT-literate relatives and neighbours with their computer problems, real and imaginary.  Recently, I had the opportunity to fix a problem of the "real" kind - a very dead hard drive that wasn't even willing to spin anymore. Good thing is, only months earlier I had converted that same PC to backing up to an external USB drive - and since everything was so easy and quick now, Grampa had been doing his backups just as religiously as taking his fiber supplement at breakfast.

Bottom line: External USB drives make a pretty neat and cost effective backup media for home users. Combined with a customized "single click" scripted backup icon on the desktop, and the instruction to always turn the USB thingy off again after backing up (so that the worm/virus doesn't get the backup as well), Grampa should be reasonably safe. Checking back, I found that he had made two backups to the CD writer in one year, and - surprisingly - weekly backups to the USB drive.