Question about backing up photos

After reading a post here about someone losing thier hard drive and my own exernal hard drive failed this week, I thought I would ask what others do to back up their photos. Right now I am just working with personal photos so I have everything on my hard drive, all raw files burned to a DVD as well as placed on an external drive. this is the second time my external has failed on me in two years for no apparent reason other than the computer gods must think I am bored! My photography instructor stated that she buys 250GB hard drives and slides them in and out as necessary. She had 36 to date but also had a studio. This gave me the idea of buying a similar hard drive and backing up photos to date and then storing it in a safety deposit box or my in-laws safe. Either way different location in case the house burns down tomorrow.

Just curious if anyone had a better system or better suggestion.

I keep the working copies on the internal hard drives but I have a couple of 250GB USB2 external drives to back the files up. Ideally one of these needs to be kept in another location. That's as well as copying to CD or DVD when I can remember to. You can't be too paranoid about backups!

cheers
Bill

Like yourself, I've been backing up to DVDs (in duplicate) and a hard drive, but I'm not completely confident that this is adequate.

For additional insurance, I'm thinking seriously about an online backup service (http://mozy.com/), which allows unlimited uploads for $4.95 a month.

for our weddings, we back up on hard drive, then burn to dvds. then i take data home, and burn it to another dvd. then its copied onto another hard drive for few months till we are 100% no complaints, then its deleted.
yes, scary to trust dvds for our backups but since we are just shooting them and give data to the company that hires us, its up to THEM to archive it.