You'll take my tape drive out of my cold, dead hands

I've seen over and over these grand "tape vs. optical" discussions. After having lost something around 5Gb of data due to disc rot, I am skeptical of any kind of optical storage. The closest I ever came near something like that would have been the Magneto-Optical band, which was an actually reliable technology. However, my dad was who had the final word back then, and he chose the hideous iomega Jaz drive. Guess who lost a crapload of data; and I wasn't immune to that either. I had a 300Mb backup that my dad decided to move over to one of those cartridges, and all the data went bye-bye. Though most of the stuff I lost was because of those other cartridges, the Iomega zip ones. Remember them???

Meanwhile, the tape camp has gone from DDS-1, DDS-2, DDS-3, DDS-4 up to DAT 72; and all those tape drives are backwards-compatible. While I don't own one myself, I did have access to one, and some of my backups are actually in DDS-4 cartridges. Some of these backups have already outlived my first ill-fated batch of CD's.

SSD's are nice, but they sometimes go crazy, so I'm not quite sure about using them for backup storage. But they are very nice for moving data :)