[[!tag backups]]

You're not the only one who cares about your data. A variety of governments, corporations, criminals, and overly curious snoopers are probably also interested. (It's sometimes hard to tell them apart.) They might be interested in it to data in order to find evidence against you, blackmail you, or just curious about what you're talking about with your other friends.

They might be interested in your data from a statistical point of view, and don't particularly care about your specifically. Or they might be interested only in you.

Instead of reading your files and e-mail, or looking at your photos and videos, they might be interested in preventing your access to them, or to destroy your data. They might even want to corrupt your data, perhaps by planting child porn in your photo archive.

You protect your computer as well as you can to prevent these and other bad things from happening. You need to protect your backups with equal care.

If you back up to a USB drive, you should probably make the drive be encrypted. Likewise, if you back up to online storage. There are many forms of encryption, and I'm unqualified to give advice on this, but any of the common, modern ones should suffice except for quite determined attackers.

Instead of, or in addition to, encryption, you could ensure the physical security of your backup storage. Keep the USB drive in a safe, perhaps, or a safe deposit box.

The multiple backups you need to protect yourself against earthquakes, floods, and roving gangs of tricycle-riding clowns, are also useful against attackers. They might corrupt your live data, and the backups at your home, but probably won't be able to touch the USB drive encased in concrete and buried in the ground at a secret place only you know about.

The other side of the coin is that you might want to, or need to, ensure others do have access to your backed up data. For example, if the clown gang kidnaps you, your spouse might need access to you backups to be able to contact your MI6 handler to ask them to rescue you. Arranging safe access to (some) backups is an interesting problem to which there are various solutions. You could give your spouse the encryption passphrase, or give the passphrase to a trusted friend or your lawyer. You could also use something like libgfshare to escrow encryption keys more safely.