Comment Use high quality media (Score 1) 499
You can use high quality media; we backup important stuff on Taiyo Yuden DVD media and I don't think we've ever had a problem reading the data later. That doesn't stop us from making quarterly snapshots and sticking them in a safe deposit box, which helps to ensure that there are many readable copies of the data available.
The question is really how much data do you need to protect long-term. For us, where the total critical data pool fits on a few DVD's, this is fine. If I was going to back up 1TB of photos, I'd probably choose a hard-drive based strategy of rotating drives out to the safe deposit box.