I've got terabytes of info I don't want to lose. Normally I'd burn them to DVD, but there's just so much of it all. It would be a lot easier just to grab a bunch of 1TB HDD's and back up to those. Not much more expensive than buying blank DVDs either.

Am I the only one who thinks this?

I stopped doing DVD's a year or so ago.
Hard drives are so cheap (especially when you're only buying the drive and not the case) that it makes sense to move our huge storage needs to huge storage devices.

How do you store them BLINDER?

I'm thinking in those plastic shells they come in, with a silica gel pack in a cupboard? Just pull them out when you need to copy new stuff to it then put it away again. So have online and offline storage of equal sizes.

Ahh, the joys of mid-line storage.

The simplest way is to just leave them bare and use a StorageDock, $49 from PC Case Gear but you can no doubt sleuth one down for less. They seem to pop up on Zazz every couple of months, too. There's one model with a built-in multiformat card reader, another with USB and eSATA, and a rollsroyce model with USB, eSATA and dual FireWire (the latter is a little harder to locate). It's simple enough to keep the drive in its shipping bag when not in use and kept in a simple cardboard box (put a thin layer of pack foam on the bottom if you're overly paranoid).

get something like this for easy access:

Yep D, that's pretty much all I do.
It'd be great to have something slightly better to use for the physical storage but at the moment it's back into their packs w/ gel and then stored either in filing cabinets or plastic containers in dark areas.
I double up on everything too. I learnt the hard way w/ DVD and CD burning that nothing is permanent.

Most of my storage of this type is related to my Aperture needs.
The itunes stuff is the only other thing I'm desperately concerned about - so that's copied onto several HD's and a couple of them have been sent O/S - true back up indeed!

Do you use the Aperture vaults to back up your Aperture library?

See? I told you we should have a group buy of these!!

Now, where was that post...

EDIT: HA! See?
http://forums.mactalk.com.au/591190-post43.html

I am moving to this same thing for backups, hard drives are cheap enough. So why bother with optical media.

Stopped using DVDs when I switched to a Drobo.

The question to end all questions.
Yes.
But do I trust that back-up?
I've never had a failure and hope I never do cause I understand that the vault back-up is not necessarily always good.
Sincerely hope Apple has made it good, safe and secure.
I do the vault thing but I'm really scared that it might not be the most protective back-up.
I get paranoid about doing manual back-ups and trust myself more than the auto vault tools.
My thing is to back-up the individual projects onto those "loose" hard drives.

I'm also one of the people switching to hard drives to store all my stuff, it's a pain trying to find the right DVD if theres heaps of them and I'm looking for one particular thing.

This my backup procedure for my personal photo collection which is about 200G at the moment.

• 2 separate 500G hard drives - one in my house(with each CF card download) and one in my parents place(done once a month)
  
• Progressively onto Taiyo Yuden DVDs - this was my original backup solution - this is also kept in my parents place.
  
• Keepers and hero shots in several online locations - gmail/myphotoalbum.com/flickr
  
• Every six months I make A4 sized prints of hero shots - I am still rather nostalgic about the tactile feel of actual photographs
  
• This year I will probably make a hero shots book as well as a family album book with Apple
  
• If I was starting today I will probably go the dual hard drive and wait for the blu-ray option.
  
• I still get slightly nervous about losing everything with a hard drive failure so will have an alternative method in addition to the hard drive option

Music I single backup onto the parents place hardrive. Most of my music is still CD based but I am buying more stuff using itunes

Rest of the stuff I trust to a dedicated Time Machine hard drive

With TBs of stuff Decryption the hard drive option is probably the most practical and economical. Probably just another copy of critical/really important stuff off site

Is it dangerous that you won't be spinning the drives up regularly? Will this lead to failures?

Well this is my plan:

Documents - upload to Amazon S3
Photos - offline HDD
iTunes purchases - upload to Amazon S3
Large Collection of Media from Various Sources - offline HDDs

Plus Time Machine on the entire local drive, as well as a weekly Super Duper disk image of the local drive.