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optical backups
Check out the typical lifespans of these, they're typically 5-10 years as the ink degrades. (It may just be a case of reburning them every few years if you want to stick with optical.)
You can get laptops that can fit 2 x 4TB PCIe4 M.2 SSDs in them: https://system76.com/laptops/darp10/configure
(My next work laptop will probably be a Darter Pro, 96GB RAM but I only need a single 1TB or 2TB NVMe in it.)
Greenbank-
Well, I'm ok with them because I saved some pictures I'd lost by restoring from backup CDs that were maybe 10-15 years old. There's also M-DISC or whatever the archival-specific backup discs are.
The benefit of the optical was: it was cheap and yeah I had multiple burns over the years so I managed to get back various bits of lost pictures from over time that must have been missed during a HDD migration or failure or something.
hippy
I have external drive backups and/or CD/DVD backups, sync between multiple machines and a couple of cloud options.
I'm tempted to get a portable blu-ray writer so I can access all my old optical backups AND do quick disc burns of stuff when I want to cart them somewhere and play DVDs on my machines that no longer have optical drives.
I also still want to upgrade my drive(s) to those enterprise U.2 ones we spoke about in this thread ages ago for more reliability as well as look at a UPS option. But realistically, I'll probably swap the aging desktop for a beefier laptop (can any laptops run U.2 drives out of the box?).