What is the best way to back up the photos from my digital camera?

We lost the hard drive on an old computer, thank God the pictures were backed up, but now I'm worried about my pictures for the future. Currently I have my pictures burnt onto CDs and backed up on an external hard drive, but I am worried that in the future a computer may not be able to read the CDs or be compatible with the external hard drive. What do you all have to say about it?

As long as you are storing the photos on the CD as data as .jpg files or other common image format. You will be fine. CD's last a long time. Cheap 100 disc spindles from the dollar store are not good idea but good brand TDK, Sony, Imation are good. If you want really long lasting reliability you can buy Gold CDs. A temperature of 18掳C and 40% relative humidity is considered suitable for long-term storage

If in the future you find you lost the drivers to connect your external drive or it just wont read you can remove it from the case and its a regular harddrive and you can put it in your computer as slave drive.

well, i myself use the same method as yours ( burn it to dvd), but to make sure, i re-burn those files every 2 years ( because dvd can be damaged over time), by this, i also make sure that my files format will still uptodate.

It totally depends on the user, for backing up u can use a DVD(if u have a hell lot of pics). You can also use cd-r etc. Backing up on hard drives is really not a good idea coz ur hdd might crash one day leaving u with nothing. The chances for cds to survive are more than hard-drives. You can also open an online album (google or yahoo) and store there. Its secure and u can access your albums from anywhere.

From your huge list of photos, maybe you want to pick out those which are really important and memorable. Go to a photo store and develop them, keep them in an album.

In case your HDD crash or your CD/DVD is unreadable, at least you still have the most memorable one with you. You can then scan them and save them inside your new HDD.