I shoot with an 18Mp camera in RAW format (about 26Mb) and work with 16 bit Tiffs (100+Mb). Thanks to inexpensive hard drives I can do multiple backups.

But..."Factor in the ease of burning to dvds (each of which can hold a thousand images easily and cost about the same price as a roll of film apparently...)" This is not very practical, as these files are pretty large. Only about 35 images per DVD! Then there's my stitched images, often in the 500Mb-1Gb in size. I never dreamed I'd be shooting images that wouldn't fit on a CD!

Cloud computing might work if you live where there's a very high speed connection, we have a modest DSL speed as the best available here, so that's out. I remember piles of floppy disks, then piles of CD's. Next it was piles of DVD's and now...? Piles of 1TB drives!

Another aspect. Back in the days when film was undisputed king, several friends and I got together and went out chasing trains pretty often, along with many other interesting subjects. We were all serious photographers, with different styles. Those that shot 35mm usually seemed to take 50-100 shots in a day, 120 photographers were more in the 20-50 range. Then there were the nuts that shot 4x5 and larger (Jack and I). We'd take 4-8 shots, once in a while as many as 16.

When we either processed or got processed all our film, the 35mm group would have 4-8 good shots for the day, the 120 group would have pretty much the same. Oddly, the large format guys would also have about the same. (when it takes 5-20 minutes to set up a shot and costs 10X as much per, you tend to not shoot unless it's worth it!) I still shoot in the same way with digital. It's very rare that I shoot more than 200 shots in a 5 day photo trip, usually half that. I like to think that I get a lot more that are worth the disk space!

Steve