I take great exception with the idea that high quality optical media is a better backup strategy than a hard drive. I will preface that by saying that I DO believe it's possible that optical media would be better for long term (10-20 year) archiving because there is no mechanical interface to fail, less susceptibility to dust, moisture, air pressure changes, oxidation, etc.
HOWEVER..
Let's say we need to back up 120 gigs of data, which represents a decent amount of media, documents etc - which do you think is more reliable - backing up once to an external hard drive, or hoping that you complete 30 burns in a row, all perfectly, that you don't misplace one of those, that not one of those 30 discs has a bad spot and your backup bails in the middle, that none of them are warped, etc.
The odds of screwing up a 30 media backup compared to a single media backup are MUCH higher once you factor in random chance of media defect, and human error, which is a huge component of backup failure.
You'd be far better off to buy 2 external drives of sufficient capacity, and maintain two backups at all times (alternate them daily or weekly or monthly or whatever your personal schedule is), than to try and manage even one backup spanned across 30 DVD's.
Ideally, you should never have fewer than 3 copies of your data - 1 live, 2 backups, one of those kept somewhere else.
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-Scott
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