Originally Posted by Wombat 
Reminders of this kind are always timely and welcome, Ben. Thanks.
When I worked in radio we used to backup large music files onto videotape. Apparently tape is a much more reliable storage medium than CD, DVD etc. and it's pretty cheap compared with DAT. Has anyone tried storing photos this way? I'm not sure how you could physically connect a video recorder to a computer to store graphics, but someone will know.
Ben is absolutely on the mark regarding the importance of backup!!
I used to work (years ago) in R&D for a storage device company, in the tape group, so this is a subject near and dear to my heart. Data backup tape = very high quality videotape as far as the formulation. Regular video recorders are analog devices and not a good choice for storing digital information, plus they are on the way out as consumer devices. For those reasons, I don't think it would be worth the effort to try and back up digital images that way.
The drives I worked on were a lot of money for home use, but very popular for data centers, servers, things like that. If you have images on line with a hosting service they are most likely backed up on this kind of technology. For home use I like multiple hard drives for low cost and ease of use.