Originally Posted by Jim_Gunn

Wow, my experience is so different than yours. I have been using the same brand of Panasonic professional tapes in my Sony FX-1 for years (and other cameras in the years before that) and I have never had a completely bad tape yet. One thing I make sure is I never record to the first thirty seconds of a Mini-DV tape, and drop outs are so very infrequent. And I recently recaptured and re-edited tapes I filmed on literally ten years ago that were simply stored in a storage place and they were pristine as the day they were shot. I am a pretty big believer in tape as a medium and long term backup. The physical media is so much more reliable and lasts longer than a hard drive does. Hard drives in my estimation are just temporary storage to edit on, and not a long term archiving solution.

I mean, come on, hard drives fail all the time! With the amount I film, no hard drives can realistically store all my raw video without having a giant rack of multiple 1 or 2 Tb hard drives sucking up power and taking up space that keeps growing every month. And backing up the data means doubling or tripling that amount of space! I may go tapeless eventually for a more efficient workflow, but I have to wrap my head around having my precious data stored in so flimsy a media with redundant backups and I just can't see dedicating the space for it.