The discussion thus far: civvies use CD-R's and businesses use tape.

...HOWEVER...

As a new professional to the field, I am unsure what I should be recommending to my family and friends. CD's and even DVD's aren't bad options, but their size becomes problematic when storing volumes of family photographs and video, in addition to the personal detritus of an online presence: funny photos, music, recipes, chat logs, etc. Tape is noted for its capacity, and longevity under the correct circumstances, but is expensive and susceptible to the same troubles as cassettes. I have also used active hard drives, but have found trying to keep data long-term on a spinning disk is just begging for a head-crash. Flash media is expensive, of limited size, and untested in long-term storage (I have lost most of my data stored on early flash drives).

So, what do I recommend to my family and friends? Should I continue to recommend quality CD's, DVD's, and correct storage procedures? Should I set up a http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ (with a RAID setup) like service for them and be prepared to transfer files to a new system every 7-10 years? What do I do about changing file types?

$200 is a reasonable target.
Last year, I bought a computer I intended to keep for several years: the cpu/mb/ram cost me $120 from a box-mart. Now, I'll throw in another 70 to 90 dollars for case/psu/kbd/mouse depending on styles and wattages.
In addition, I often see pre-assembled towers for $150. If you need a computer for cheap, talk to your friendly neighborhood nerd/geek/dork. (except that if you are here, you likely are that person: yes, we are pretty much doomed)

Naah, I'd rather Get Smart.

... and filled with the digital backups of my technical books.

We seem to have found another of many places where our rights are being eroded: if the cops don't care, and the techs don't ask, who is looking out for the little guy?

...And I say we need to be encrypting our traffic anyway. The average computer contains more than enough processing power, and the average 'pipe' width can easily handle the extra resources needed for widespread use of encryption in day-to-day use.

In addition, the recent trend in government is towards snooping and perv-ish behavior: China with its "great" firewall, USA with its unwarranted spying and packet sniffing, and now the UK with its new "three-strikes" policies. I pay my ISP a significant sum of money to deliver me 1s and 0s as fast as they can, and there are very, very few exceptions in which they have a need to know what those 1s and 0s add up to.

I call upon the open source community to lead the way -- while I would love to see the big leagues (Microsoft, Apple, etc) apply their tonnage behind such a problem, pigs are more likely to fly first. How hard would it be for a browser to automatically attempt to negotiate a secure connection for every visited web page and only use normal, unencrypted access when a secure connection fails or cannot be completed in a secure amount of time? People running web servers would not have to make major modifications, only implement a new protocol.

For this reason, we should ban horseless carriages.

"a US Court of Appeals judge, about the struggling horse industry. Posner explains why he thinks the horse industry will continue to struggle, and then comes to a rather unusual conclusion: "Expanding copyright law to bar access to automobiles ...."

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- John Gilmore

My personal recommendation is to build/buy a cheap server to act as an intermediate machine. This machine can be patched and posed as required to use the school networks, and you can run whatever you want on your personal machine. This intermediate doesn't have to be anything special or powerful and I'll bet your local CS student/ friendly neighborhood haxor can put something together for under $50. I would recommend a dual NIC setup.

You do still have all the traditional options of swapping out NICs every 2 weeks, reverse engineering the software (which would be helpful for the rest of us), etc

Question for parent:
Will your Hugh Jackman 'bot have Wolverine claws?
What will happen when my Fem-bot and your Jackman 'bot elope? Mutant Cylons?
How will the ratio of 'bots' sexes reflect the general population?

Dike the thing out and either cover the hole so no-one notices the phone used to have a camera or leave a gaping empty hole so that everyone can see there WAS a camera there but not any more.