Good point. Which is why I use cases for mine when storing them... Not completely safe but if dropped the case absorbs most of the shock. Hence, I do not ever drop them

I use this method as well. But optical's get tedious when you have stuff that exceeds the 46.6GB limit so the really big stuff remains on the HDD. I should add if one does use optical media - get your media from somewhere other than cram-a-zon, and make certain that it's decent media. Also the use of crc's with optical is essential to make certain that what you stared with is what was written to the disc.

 

There's a lot to say about backups depending on how critical data we're talking about, but whatever the method and the medium there's one simple truth:

Unless a backup is regularly tested it isn't a backup at all.

 

The safest way for backing up data is to burn it to discs.
The life span of BluRay discs is at about 50-100 years and you can get writable blanks with up to 128GB (quad layer BDXL).
I'm backing up the important stuff that way since ages. My data from when I was a teen is still intact on a stack of burned
DVDRW's in my basement while over the years a lot of flash drives & hdd's said good bye.