Quote Originally Posted by Mike Anderson
I know people talk about how CDs etc have a finite life span, but I've never actually had one go bad, and I have some I burned years and years ago.

The Taiyo Yuden DVDs are supposed to be archival quality, and once I burn them I don't touch them, I just store them in a cool dry place.

The other thing is that I live in earthquake country. I like to give my DVD backups to a friend to store, on the logic that it's less likely both our houses will be utterly destroyed. Even a RAID setup won't do much good if your house goes down.
Good point. A friends house or a safe deposit box would be a good idea if you're really serious about backing up your library, and DVDs are probably the easiest/most stable way for consumers to use off-site storage. External hard drives would be more fragile than DVDs, and tape backups (while very stable) are expensive for the amount of storage you would need.