Recently, two photographers I know had computer problems and didn't know for a few days if they were going to loose all of their photos or not. As it turned out, neither of them did, but for several days they were in total anguish and in the end one of the two had to spend a hefty amount of cash to retrieve/rescue his photos. Both of these people are excellent photographers with hundreds if not thousands of photos that any nature photographer would love to have. Neither one had a backup strategy for their photos. I was stunned. Then I realized this was actually fairly normal. Many of us are too busy,don't think it will happen to us, or just don't realize the chance we take by not having backups of our photos.
So, first of all lets get this out of the way. If you want or expect to have your photos available to you going forward, you HAVE to have some sort of backup plan. Digital photography is wonderful and has many advantages over film. That being said, with digital, if you expect to keep your photos, you have to have a backup plan. Otherwise you will sooner or later most likely loose some or all of the shots that you wanted to keep forever.
Ok, before we get to what kind of backup/archive plan you need, we need to realize something first. Burning your photos to a cd or dvd is NOT a backup plan. Not a long term one anyway. The longevity of a home burned cd or dvd can be as short as a year. That is if nothing happens to physically damage the disk. Usually they will last a lot longer than a year, but they are not expected to last longer than 10 years,and will usually begin to have some data loss or become unreadable after 5 years. Again this without considering any physical damage to the disk. Some brands of media (discs) perform FAR better than others. The problem is it is manufacturer dependent and the brand name on the box has very little to do with who actually made the product. So, long story short, if you think you have a backup plan for your photos and that plan is burning them to cd's or dvd's, you have no plan.
There will be options and alternatives to fit our individual requirements, but another thing that needs to be mentioned is that having one copy of your photos is not a backup plan. Period. What is needed to reasonably assure that your photos will be around as long as you want them to be is at least two copies of each photo, one stored at your house or office and the other stored "off site". That is the minimum, ideal situation. Now off site can be a business that specializes in off site data storage, your friends house - as long as they live far enough away -, or some of the new online places that offer "Cloud" storage. Keeping a copy of your photos at a friends or relatives house is fine as long as you live far enough apart that a flood,fire,tornado, or whatever is very unlikely to effect both your house and theirs.
You will have to figure out what will work for you based on how many photos you have,how important they are to you and other factors. I use two external hard drives. Again, having only one copy is not a backup plan. After I return from a photo trip and weed out the shots I want to keep, they are transfered to both drives. If I haven't really went on any trips and haven't taken any "once in a lifetime" shots, everything I want to save gets copied to both drives once a month. On a trip, everything gets copied to an external drive every night. The drive and the laptop that they are also stored on are kept separate. The external drive might be left at the motel room for example while the laptop will be with me. Personally, I'm not a fan of the new "Cloud" storage as such. It may fit in well for your needs. Right now, I don't have a fixed off site storage location. That will soon change. What would work best for you, you will have to decide, but in some form or another please have at least two copies of your photos and don't rely on home burned dvd's/cd's for this task.
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