Backups [was Re: Is tape dead?]

I have a HD video production rig that goes out to some geek events and I've used it in the past at stuff. The data generated is around 5GB per hour (H264 1080i) A few years ago I bought a BD-R drive from Samsung, and recorded 3 copies each of all the video from a few events that I wanted to put on the shelf. I verified the media was the metal stuff not the dye stuff (one is HTL, other is LTH, can't remember which is which.) 6 months later all of the BD-R discs were unreadable. I blamed the drive, RMA'ed with Samsung and confirmed with a friend on his Pioneer -- nope, the media somehow lost all the data. Memorex branded, was what you could find commercially local. The thing is a lot of it is rebadged Ritek and other vendors. Data lost. Not thrilled, and not sure I can trust that format after that issue. I did buy some Verbatim BD-R media but haven't used it yet. Pretty much keep everything on power consuming heat producing spinning disk. I've heard some horror stories with tape as well. When I worked at NASA the powderhorns we had originally had some tape drive that was like $100,000 each but really I guess was made from SVHS VCRs. STK literally had two drives on site all the time as the ones that were swapped in that week when two would fail. I think they converted it over to an IBM tape, can't remember what the SVHS based thing was but it was single reel spooled out into the deck, probably 9840 or something. I would cut multiple tapes of anything you care about! -- Ethan O'Toole