External drives - long term viability

Hello fellow FCP'ers...
I am on my 4th 1TB external drive - and it is filling up quickly with my HD media.
It's becoming a worrisome liability... does anyone have a plan for the future? What if one of these drives fails? I'm wondering how I "back up the back ups."
I have a friend at a video house who says backing up on tape is the best solution - wouldn't that be extremely costly to back a full terabyte of HD video?
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated,
Cheers,
Paul

Actually, I don't wait for the first one to fill up. I have about three levels of redundancy for all my important data, as well as having it all living on a RAID 6 where I work. That's where I use everything, but whenever I save something important, I also save it on a hard drive, and a compressed version on a DVD and a flash drive. The compressed versions are a fail safe. I can't really use them, but in a pinch, if everything else got lost (hardly possible…, but possible) then at least I can have a delivery version if needed.
I also don't keep everything in the same physical space. Some of it I keep at home, some I keep on my person, and some I keep on hard drives that travel with me, and of course the masters are at work on the SAN.
What failed on your drive? It's usually the power supply, especially if you just bought it. If it's a Lacie, they have notoriously bad power supplies. If you just buy another one for $16 (or get them to send you another one for free) you'll most likely be all set. As well, the chip boards in LaCies are not very good either, so if you have more than one, you might be able to use the chip board from one on the broken one long enough to transfer the information.

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