Price aside, every method has it's faults and if something fails some where along the line it's going to be an inconvenience. It's a matter of when that fault happens and how catastrophic it is.
I've used removable optical media for over 10 years now and it's worked very well. Every so often I upgrade the media to new media and keep the old backups stored away. Some people will use HDs and do the same thing, ugprade the HDs when newer cheaper versions come along. I've had some discs fail, but the amount of data lost was small and could be recovered.
At a smaller company I used to work for they would back up their network to hard drives and ship them away. They would keep 3 weeks of backups and rotate through the HDs. After a HD had been used for a set amount of time, it would be retired and new hard drives would be ordered.
I've read about people who would build a NAS, or some other kind of cheap server with a RAID in it. Started out with 4 100GB drives, when it got full they built a second system with 250GB drives, when it got full, rebuilt the old system with 500GB drives...etc etc. That worked great for them.
Depending on how much I need to backup in a month, it could cost me nothing(use DVDs I've already bought) to $40 if I need to add another 400-800 GB.
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