There are plenty of tools on the market for backup and archiving of SharePoint content. However, most of these require complicated installations, as well as a great deal of investment in terms of time and resources. For many scenarios this can be somewhat over the top.
BlueBridge Save2Disk is a .NET based client application that allows you to download SharePoint sites (including lists and libraries) quickly and efficiently. Once you've exported the content, you can then e.g. burn it to CD and give it to your business partners and colleagues or archive it internally. And the best thing: you don't need SharePoint to be able to open the files!
The following links will take you straight to where you need to go: