Personally, I feel that CD/DVD/Blu-Ray technology is far inferior to solid state memory (as in Flash Drives).
 
In some cases they are no longer playable except on the device that burns them (especially at higher burn rates).
In other cases they do degrade in time, especially in harsh environments.
They are also the slowest devices I use (although I use them rarely).
The file system storage has some character and path name length limits, so if you have a path like, say,
"K:\Sonar X3\Cakewalk Projects\2015\Audio\Samples\Processed (64-bit float WAV)" - good luck.
Finally, they have a top storage limits of a few GB, which is usually the size of most of my projects.
 
Compare that to a high speed 64 GB USB 3 flash drive. It can read and write at 100 MBps or so, costs about $20-30 and the price to storage ratio improves every few months.
 
I think CDs/DVDs are dead, except perhaps for movie rentals.
 
Alternately, if you prefer rotational, archival storage - the small USB 3 powered external backup drives run in sizes from 500 GB to about 1 TB and cost about $50-60. These prices also continue to drop and storage size increases. The disadvantage is that these are pretty easy to drop.
 

arachnaut is totally wrong on this.  USB Flash drives are NOT a reliable form of backup and you should never consider using them for that purpose. I have seen many a flash drive fail for no reason.
 
Hard drives are good but DVD is an excellent backup option.  eg whatever you have backed up on a drive should be on a DVD somewhere as well. I don't like the dual layer DVD's though. The standard 4.7G version is very stable.  I still use NERO and every DVD it produces opens up perfectly on any computer.  (in my case I have DVD's that are 15 years or more old and they are still perfect)
 
I run a business doing this and have to be able to restore sessions at one time or another.  Hard drives fail as well and the DVD has saved my bacon more than once.
 

I use NERO, which I hate for many, many reasons.  However, NERO has one feature that makes it indispensable for data backup where files being backed up are quite large - sample libraries in particular.  The feature is an easy-to-use file span capability that splits large files over multiple backup disks and adds a program with which to easily reconstruct them upon restore.

bitflipper
I only care about data backups (sample libraries) - not copying movies, authoring audio CDs or making slideshows.  

I have seen this thread pop up a few times and assumed making CDs/DVDs until I read the OP again ("backups" kept sticking out). Backup CDs are scary to me anymore, since most of them have the media on the label side (i.e. not encased in plastic, so scratching the label side ruins the media... scratch the other side and you have to deal with that too!)
 
External USB3 drives are now so tiny you can put them in your pocket, hold 500GB-1TB, and relatively cheap. Just the time involved with "burning a CD/DVD" makes them less desirable to an external HDD. For backups, I have been using 2 of these and running xcopy/robocopy to update files during my backup cycles, which is something that is definitely worth considering as an alternative. From a monetary/waste perspective the external drive also will win in the long run.

Jeff Evans
arachnaut is totally wrong on this.  USB Flash drives are NOT a reliable form of backup and you should never consider using them for that purpose. I have seen many a flash drive fail for no reason.
 
Hard drives are good but DVD is an excellent backup option.  eg whatever you have backed up on a drive should be on a DVD somewhere as well. I don't like the dual layer DVD's though. The standard 4.7G version is very stable.  I still use NERO and every DVD it produces opens up perfectly on any computer.  (in my case I have DVD's that are 15 years or more old and they are still perfect)
 
I run a business doing this and have to be able to restore sessions at one time or another.  Hard drives fail as well and the DVD has saved my bacon more than once.
 

 
Perhaps you should buy higher quality Flash Drives.
 
Anyway, I don't want to get into an argument about this, but I have dozens and dozens of Flash drives and no failures.
 
I usually get the Patriot Rage (4 channel NAND).
 
I have had plenty of DVD failures, so maybe my CD burner is the loser.
 

Responding mainly to Jeff, because have used USB drives more and more for external backup and never had a problem, except for overwrite fuk ups.
 
Got my main data archived to either USB sticks or larger external hard drives. And hard drives may fail, as much as a DVD can bleach out and fail.
 
My problem, with increasing data size, even DVD doesn't hold enough, and fully support your claim that the hi density DVD's are unreliable, and expensive to turn into coffee cup toasters.
 
Overwrite errors are the main risk of incremental backups on USB devices. You have a 10GB file that you have added to and updated the previous archive. Save the new archive and something is forked up, and you have replaced the one that works.
 
DVD carved in stone so you can go back to the hard copy.
 
My crystal ball going forward...
 
CD and DVD is relatively soon a dead medium, meaning maybe in anyone's lifetime reading this. Limitation in capacity, inevitable change in Red Book standard. Mostly however because it is spinning around. Bridge toward the future, but doomed because it is lower level mechanical device requiring so many RPM's of motion..
 
Next generation will be all on chips or USB 5 sticks up the line. Medium is static and a laser or whatever scans the stationary device.
 
Nostalgia crap...  Back in the dark ages of vinyl 33's. The damn things burned out as fast as you could scar them with your worn stylus in the turntable, but holding the elegant giant graphics in front of you was part of the rush.
 
Cassette and CD reduced the graphic.
 
Soon, we'll have a less than 1 inch square shrink wrapped chip with every pristine video, ad, offers, toolbars for the browser, tracking software. Eventually we will find the music in the mess somewhere.
 
Still miss the safety and simplicity of the defective vinyl disc. Especially miss the big pictures on the LP jacket.
 
John
 

If you're connected to network, there are other more expensive, but more convenient options too. A router with a usb port which lets you connect a usb drive to it and access it from any computer on your internal network. I have an ASUS n66u router (about $100) with that capability. Or, a more expensive NAS (about $350) which accomplishes that and redundantly backs up all its data to a second drive. These are more convenient because you can store your downloads/updates there and access them from any machine in the house without having to find and move a dvd or usb drive around.

Dstrenz,
 
Not wanting to derail this thread, but could you expand opinion about the ASUS modem.
 
I have something ancient going into an even more ancient Netgear wireless, which is and has been causing multiple problems. Friend said my problem is in the antiquity of the system. Get with Asus.
 
Your thoughts appreciated...
 
John
 

John, Well, I can tell you that the router works great for me. The UI is excellent compared to the Linksys ones I've been using for 20 yrs or so. And, even though I don't have a gigabit network, network transfers are definitely faster. But, I can't tell you how the usb drive interface works because I already have a Synology 213j NAS (about $350 with 2-2tb WD Red drives) so I haven't needed to use the ASUS for that.

I would like to relate a bit more about my experiences with storage devices.
 
Several years ago I had 2 firewire 800 external drives. There must have been a firmware error in the Firewire controller for this model because I went through about 13 of these drives over a period of about 10 months and finally I took them apart and just used the bare drives (which continue to work fine to this day).
 
I had about 10 terabytes of storage and the error rate on these kinds of rotational drives is such that I probably will always have a bit error somewhere in there. So I made a set of Windows scripts using md5deep to create a data base of all the hashes of every file on a drive (actually it was more general - any drive, any folder, or any file). Anyone who wants a copy of these can have them for the asking.
 
Using these I can tell if the data changes on any drive.
 
Now about flash storage:
 
I have seen one case of a bit error on a cheap, freebie USB drive that a store gave away.
 
I have seen cases where a 32 GB drive only had 16 GB of data. I have seen USB 3 drives that run at USB 2 speeds.
 
I have about a dozen or more Patriot flash drives which are all I tend to get these days. I usually format them for using NTFS and I test them when I buy them - for proper speed, proper size, and if all bits are OK.
 
Amazon users report good results with these drives (594 posts, 435 are 5 stars):
http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Supersonic-Series-Flash-PEF32GSRUSB/dp/B008R6OPJQ
 
The Flash drives I buy are warrantied for 5 years. Other than a few that failed right out of the box and got returned, I have not experienced any failures.
 
Now about CD/DVDs:
 
I have gone through a few CD/DVD drives over the past few years. I confess that the last one I bought was only about $20, so they may have all been poor. But I have taken some apart and they all seem to use the same assembly for the laser.
 
Many of my old CD/RW discs are no longer readable and these were probably only written once.
 
Several discs that I have burned at high speeds have failed, so I normally use the slowest speeds when I do this task (which I now do very rarely).
 
I do have maybe a hundred DVD movies and many Blu-Ray movies. I also take out a few DVDs from our library every week.
 
I would conjecture that maybe 1 in 10 or 20 of these video disks will glitch. Some just a simple one, others catastrophically. Checking them for visual defects sometimes reveals empty spots or thin spots where one can see through. (Recordable data disks, I know, are different, but this is still scary data to me).
 
Your mileage may vary, but I will never use CD/DVD for my backup data.
 
If you think solid state is unreliable, don't think about getting a solid state drive, or trust your tablet or smart phone.
 
I don't have a tablet or smart phone or anything that uses SSD drives, but many people do and the future is pretty easy to see.
 
Many new products don't have rotational devices (DVD or Hard drives) of any kind.
 
I believe that magnetic tape is still considered the best long term archival media.