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I have all my photos from childhood until now as regular hard copies.

I have negatives for some of them.

I would like to convert all these photos to digital copies so that I can store them on DVDs & Hard drive.

What is the best way to do this so that I can get fairly good copies without giving up too much quality ?

Thank You.

Scanning them would be the most obvious solution. You could also get the negatives converted into digital format for you at a photo studio which offers the service. Alternatively, there's a scanner available that converts film negatives and prints to digital format but it's pricey (about $100) so only consider it if you have a ton of negatives and prints lying around that would cost about the same to convert at a shop. You can get it here.

A decent shop with good equipment can probably do the scanning better and faster than any home user device ever could, but the price can become pretty high with many pictures.

"fairly good" and "too much" are subjective and depend on the condition of the originals. You should ask the professionals about this.

Depending on the amount of pictures and the quality you are after, disk space may become an issue too. Hundred-megabyte lossless image files can add up to a serious storage requirement.

thank you all

the biggest problem scanning real photographs (or any 'printed media') is the Moray Effect.

see this for an example

a good photo finishing shop will be able to do the corrections and create a CD
of the results