Fuzzy...unfortunately, DVD media can be amongst the most expensive and least reliable forms of long term storage. I've got MANY DVDs and CDRs failing to read after less than 5 years...many only 1 or 2 years old.
That's not true. I've only ever found 2 bad discs in my collection out of several hundred (one of which was a cheap DVD9 I'd expect to go bad, and was only bad in the 2-unreadable-tracks sense). I stick at least 2-3 a week in my drive for reading, so it's unlikely a significant fraction are bad. Cost per unit of storage for DVDs is less than for hard drives (I just did a quick calculation, it's about 11 cents per gigabyte for Verbatim DVDs, about 22 for the $80 250GB hard drive I just bought).
Well, 2 bad discs is 2 bad discs. To me, that's unacceptable performance.
My personal experience is that I've lost maybe 1 disc in a hundred...maybe a little bit more maybe less. I don't really know the numbers. To me that is WAAAY too many.
The key point though is that, as time passes, I lose more and more data. It's a well publicized fact that optical discs have a shelf life.
As far as cost, a spindle of 50 DVDRs in my area costs about $20.
$20 / (4.7GB/disc x 50 discs) = 8 cents a gb
I've bought three 1TB drives in the last year for $100 or less...
$100 / 931gb = 11 cents a gb
So, I guess I did overstate that the cost of DVDR media is more expensive, but given the unreliability of the optical media, I'm sticking with my method of saving everything onto harddrives and backing up with redundant harddrives.
Consider this...if optical media is reliable, then why have virtually 100% of companies stopped using optical and tape-based methods for saving their crucial commercial data? Instead they use redundant drives with nightly backups, where every night the data is backed up with off-site machines that have guaranteed power sources.
I'm not saying you should abandon your method of storage. If you're happy with it, then that's great.
I'm just reinforcing why I personally choose the method that I use.