Photo organization

Interested in a forum piece about importing and organizing photos. Seems to be a wide variety of alternatives some unnecessarily complicated and some with software which I know nothing of - but this method seemed logical:

"I use a USB 2 card reader to import into Lightroom. It's quicker than my camera and doesn't need me to worry about balancing/powering the camera, wear on the plugs etc.I import the raw files into a folder based on date, sorted by year and use keyword tags in lightroom. I go through and delete the absolutely useless shots, then grade, then when finished editing/correcting take the ones I want to keep and export to Jpeg in a folder structure based on subject/date i.e. main folder Family, sub folders by year, then subfolder by occasion. This way I can quickly find any shot I want either by jpg or in lightroom.The final jpegs are stored on one disk, the raws on another and the lightroom catalogue and backups on alternate disks. Each disk gets backed up frequently to external USB disks and DVD's."

Worth thinking about a bit more - I also import from card reader to Lightroom but have no real understanding of where/how the catalogue is stored. Also one post gave a warning about losing an entire catalogue in Lightroom. I really need to think about this...

What do I want? I want:

1. Import from card reader to folder in C drive. To be imported into folder with a name I allocate - but should be done by date format yyyy_mm_dd. This is a raw file in NEF format. Crap photos would then be deleted.
2. Then imported into Lightroom - at the moment this is done as:
   Import Photos at Their Current Location leaves the images where they are and stores their location in the Lightroom database. Advantage: Lightroom lets you preserve the current organizational structure of your folders.
3. Look at amending import to:
   Copy Photos as Digital Negative (DNG) and Import converts the image files to DNG (digital negative) and then adds them to your catalog. Advantage: Lightroom writes metadata directly to the DNG file instead of using a sidecar file and provides an openly documented alternative to proprietary raw file formats.
4. Copying should be saved as:
   The default option, By Original Folders, creates a new folder with the same name as the folder that contained the imported images. Advantage: This is a good choice if you store your images in
   folders according to the name of the shoot.
5. Once worked on they will be backed up as a catalogue to the external hard drive once a week and also in my incremental backup. Begs the question as to whether I need to export them as DNG's so that they can be worked on with later software/camera etc. Should they also be backed up to DVD? I'm not sure - but I do know for certain that I don't know how to recover a catalogue if Lightroom plays up. Time for some more research I reckon...