Had a note in the letterbox today - it said that over the last couple of weeks burglaries on my street and a couple close by were double, or triple,  the normal rate. 

My first thought was not over most of the stuff that I would lose if anyone pinched it but more how much i would lose if they stole my HTPC.  Its not the HTPC itself though - i'd probably do ok out of the insurance - but I have all my photos and videos stored on there.
 
So today I embarked on performing a full backup of all the photo and videos to DVDs.  I've done backups before, but they are such a pain that i do them infrequently.  Anyway, this time i needed 8 dual layer DVDs to back everything up on which is some 60-70GB of photos and videos! (and by videos, i mean from the camera/camcorder, not from teh internet, or recorded tv).  Because I have a new baby and an HD camcorder the rate at which this collection is growing means that I will probably need double that space, at least, in another year which begs the question - whats the best way to handle these backups now.....

In the past I have relied on flickr and other online photo repositories to keep a backup of my photos which works great (and is fireproof!), but when the volume of photos skyrockets, and the dsl upload speeds remains constant, flickr and other online options become less attractive.  Also its not easy to manage backing your snaps up to these places as you have to choose what to upload, rather than sync a directory.

There are some online backup companies that give you tools to backup your PC (or folders) by sending only the changes up - these are ideal, but usually quite expensive per GB of storage.

HDD's are cheap now, so are SD/Flash products, but not necessarily easy to work with backup products and i'm not sure i'd trust them long term either.

DVD-R's are cheap, DVD-R DL's are less so, but both are also painful to use with backup software - i dont want a .bkp file or other, i'd rather the files are saved simply as files on the discs so I dont need to reinstall nero, or whatever, to get the data back again.

Blu-Ray discs have decent capacity, but recorders and media are still quite expensive.  I'd still have the same problem with saving as 'backup files' or original files though.

What do you do to protect your precious photos and other digital media these days?