A quick write-up on backing up your photos after each photo shoot...this isnt the only way however this is an easy and cost effective way of doing things....there are other ways of doing this too..so if you feel something else works better for you do share it here.
There are also automated methods of backup. Something like what most BPOs use where data gets automatically copied from one server to the other at set intervals however I'm suggesting a simple easy to use back up solution and I'm not going to go into automated back up's
Before you actually start taking back-ups,
think of a good naming / filing / labeling system that you will use...something that is easy to remember and recollect what it means. You can label your photo back up as "DroidSigma244XT#$%Victor" but if you cant remember what that means and which photos that refers to it aint going to help. Instead chose something that refers to the date and location or photo type.
One thing i learnt while i did an MCSE years ago was that
all data storage devices have chances of failing at some point in time. Secondly,
everything that's online as well as digitized, at some point in time will face the chance of a data or security breach.
Which means that there exists a chance that your images may just disappear or get into someone else's hands at some point in time. Now you really cant do anything to prevent this from happening - shit happens...what you can do is make it more difficult for you to lose everything in one go when things go horribly wrong.
You need to decide how important your photographs are to you..if you feel they are not important and you can afford to lose them, then dont bother with a back up or anything...but if you feel that your photos are important to you then spend a fraction of the cost as well as time that you've spent in taking those photos, on taking a back up.
Data security and storage issues start as soon as you take the photograph. So you need to
transfer photos from your SD / CF card to a hard disk at the earliest. Accidents can happen - cards have been known to fail or give trouble. Imagine coming back home from a 2 week trip and then realizing that ur photos are gone. Even if the card is fine, you can end up accidentally deleting a photo..or worse - formatting the card

For those of you who use more than one card check if you store the other card in the right manner...leave it around carelessly to be knocked about in that big camera bag and you'll end up with a not so pleasant surprise the next time you put it in the camera.
To cut a long story short - Transfer from the SD / CF card to the PC / laptop / External HDD at the earliest. The longer you leave your photos on your memory card, the higher are the chances of you losing them via cards going kaput or you accidently deleting them
You are now back at home from your photography trip. Before you process those images or sort them or look through them - take a backup.
Copy all your unprocessed images to the hard disk in the folder that you've chosen. This preferably should not be the same drive on which your computer OS is stored. If you've got more than 1 hard disk in your PC then put your images on the secondary hard disk and not the primary HDD.
The exception to this rule is if your "other" hard disk is the older one which keeps making some strange ticking sounds....in that case - dont put anything on this hard disk unless its something that you can live without..for example your porn collection :p
Burn a DVD with the unprocessed images (RAW files if you've got them...jpeg if you've shot in that format) and label it appropriately. Remember - DVD's look identical - its important that you label them....device your own method or name format so you remember which disk has unprocessed files from which particular shoot. Store these appropriately. Some paranoid individuals have been known to create 2 copies and keep 1 each in a different location.
Now go through your images using whatever software you usually use to sort, segregate, label and process and then
save them in the "final" storage place which is another folder somewhere on your hard disk (the hard disk on your computer and
not an external hard disk). These images usually would be in Tiff or jpeg format.
Burn another DVD with these images (the processed jpeg / tiff files) - label it appropriately
Keep an external hard disk to make another copy of your folder that has the final processed images. Some people may want to replace this external hard disk with an
online storage solution...or maybe use both - the External HDD as well as the online storage solution.
Double check that you've got the following sets of storage and back-up's for photos from each of your photos shoots / photo trips -a) 2 sets of DVDs with processed and unprocessed files
b) Processed + unprocessed files stored on your computer hard disk
c) Processed files on an external HDD and / or onlineAll media is perishable....how long each would last depends on how well you store it and a certain element of luck. The idea is to spread out your photos as the chances of everything failing at the same time is negligible.
In case you do find that your SD card + DVD + External HDD + Computer HDD all of them have crashed / gone corrupt / failed at the same time, it either means someone from the CIA has busted you or maybe God is conspiring against you...in either of these cases, you as a poor photographer can do nothing apart from take more photos and hope you dont get busted again
I'd also suggest you make a high quality fine art type print on archival paper of images that you really cherish. They most probably will last longer than the digital images 