Hi Don, a DVD burner is a great solution since they can store up to 8 gigs on one DVD. Splitting up 11 gigs onto CDROMS is painful. I've done it.
Another solution would be the external drive but they can fail too. It's best to put your backups onto tape or some type of non-mechanical media. The odds are in your favor they wouldn't break at the same time but it's still possible.
I work in the I.T. field and see hard drives just quit frequently. Most of the time it's preceeded with some odd clicking, drive noises or errors. This weekend, a drive on one of my poweredge servers quit. No warning, just stopped working. Luckily it's on an array and I only had to slap in a new drive. Frightening though.
If you're ever concerned about your entire PC, images, OS, etc... look into Norton Ghost -
Norton Ghost
This software makes an "image" or cloan of your entire PC. If your hard drive fails, this software (and a new hard drive) will have your entire PC back to the way it was within minutes or hours. With normal backups, you still have to reinstall programs, operating system, etc... Ghost is only around $70 and you can even set it up to do automatic incremental backups.
Good luck and may your hard drives last forever.