Yeah, my first Age was just a bunch of cylinders and cubes on top of each others too...
For the terrain, instead of applying a subsurf modifier, which doesn't always produce good results, you could try sculpt mode with dynamic topology enabled. Deledrius recommended it a while ago, and I've been playing with it the past few days. Looks good with a bit of practice.
About storing pictures, Photobucket would be nice if it didn't have two major drawbacks:
- image/album description is never displayed fine
- it's ss...ll...oo...ooo...www...
Imgur seems a bit better.
And yeah, remember to backup often, and save regularly. Personally I don't need a lot of backup files: I keep all my "backup meshes" on a different scene, and make sure I have a version of the Blender file stored on the cloud (in case of hard drive disk failure. Blender files are the only thing you can't redownload or reinstall).