My problem with tape drives (other than being slower because of the seek times) is that they are magnetic media.  Harddrives are as well, but they are somewhat insulated whereas tapes and floppy disks are prone to any magnetic fields in close proximity.  As a guitar player with a 250W amp and a Logitech Z-5500 500W in a small office, I have to be particularly careful about magnetic media.  There are speakers everywhere with nice big magnets!

External harddrives are nice, but they do occupy space.  Unless you are able to afford upgrading to larger and larger ones over time as data becomes larger and accumulates faster (I know this all too well), you'll end up with more and more of them.  Compared to CD/DVD discs that are virtually spaceless, external harddrives are big and take up space.  If you can trust ALL of your data on one big honkin' drive, so be it.

In a fire, for instance, I can grab my 320 disc bag and save all of my software and data archives (it's heavy, but easily transported by hand).  How much work is it to grab five or six external drives in such circumstances - and how much manhandling can they take similarly?

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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