Updated with more detail and maybe fewer typos: I certainly considered tape and used it in the past, but there are two huge upsides to hard disks: 1. Obviousl

Updated with more detail and maybe fewer typos: I certainly considered tape and used it in the past, but there are two huge upsides to hard disks: 1. Obviously access and transfer time is much better. 2. I can access hard disks from 30+ years ago. My oldest drives use SCSI and IDE, but even SATA has been around for ages. My tapes however can only be read of the particular branch of tape drives and there are an infinitude of standards/models around so I'd have to store the tape drive along with it. I'm not sure I'd be able to restore my father old backups as the tape drive was some weird PC thing. A few years ago I finally transferred my tapes to my FreeNAS box and breathed a sigh of relief as I don't know when I'd be able to run my DAT changer again. So, no thanks, I'll stay with hard drives (mind you, drives _will_ die as well so you still need redundancy). PS: I want to emphasize that I was talking about shelf life. For data sitting in a good NAS, like ZFS based FreeNAS, I have little worries as there's redundancy and weekly scrubbing (and I do have a backup of that as well). I do worry a great deal about any data that might sit on a USBKey or an SSD in the closet.