What's the best workflow for Home Movie Importing and Enjoying?

I'm new to iMovie (and the mac) and have started importing all my home movies from my camcorder into iMovie. I quickly realized that movies take a huge amount of disk space and it may or may not be reasonable to import all my movies and keep them on the hard disk in .dv format. At 12GB/Hour I would need 1.2 Terabytes of storage (plus backup). If that is the best workflow, i'm happy to invest in a few terabytes of storage and back up. But before I do that, I want to check to see if there is a different workflow I should follow given my use case.
Here is my use case:
I have 100 hours of 8mm and miniDV tapes already and plan to continue creating more.
I want to import them all into the iMac for ease of organization, searching for the clips of interest, and watch them either on my iMAC and also on my TV (via TIVO).
I may do some editing, but this is not a big priority for me at this time. I may do more editing in the distant future when I have more time. My editing for now will be limited to rejecting portions of clips I don't want.
I plan to watch the movies from my iMac on my TV via my TIVO (i've already ordered the Roxio Toast software that I understand I need, per the Tivo web site).
The final piece of my use case is back-up. I'd prefer to back up my movies on disk this way I maintain any editing i've done in case of a disk failure. Depending on what video format is recommended, this may bump me into a RAID multi-terabyte system as both working and automatic backup?
Here are my questions:
Should I maintain my event library in .dv format? (and bite the bullet on the storage)
Or is the .dv format intended only for temporary editing and users are expected to compress into another format after editing? if so, what format and which tool is recommended? (keeping in mind that I want to view the clips via Tivo and Roxio/Toast).
If I need to byte the bullet and invest in storage, my quick math suggests I'll need about 2 terabytes for the library and 2 more for back up for a total of 4 terabytes!?. Is a RAID system recommended for this? (I was surprised that the Apple store did not carry such a system, so perhaps that is not the best option). What would you recommend?
Anyone out there with a similar use case? I know I've asked a lot of questions here. I'd appreciate any recommendations you may have, even if you cant answer all of them.
Thank you.

I am in a similar mode, though about half as much existing DV footage.
+Should I maintain my event library in .dv format? (and bite the bullet on the storage)+
Short answer, yes; long answer:
I did "bite the bullet" since 1T drives are at or just over $100. I'm using a MacBook Pro so I bought an 2 port eSATA card for my cardbus slot ($34), and a 1T eSATA/Firewire/USB drive ($119). I don't plan to "back up" as I am not going to get rid of my Mini DV tapes/vhs/analog tapes, etc. Those will be in an off-site dark cool closet elsewhere. I don't want to do RAID or such as it still puts everything in the same drive unit, in the same location. Basically I'm splitting my video import to two different physical drives. So if lightning, thieves, personal incompetence or whatever strikes, there's more chance it'll only affect one of the drives. I've thought about a Drobo, which you might consider. It is unique device that offers a spin on RAID that offers some advantages.
Everything I read here on these boards suggests that it is best to grab the source video in the original format whenever possible. Since storage is cheap, makes sense to me.
It is likely you wouldn't compress your video unless you were going to edit it. For example if you wanted to make a video of the kids growing up to give the relatives you'd likely end up compressing to burn them a dvd. You would compress if you were going to use MobileMe, YouTube, etc. to post some footage. Whether you watch the video from home, or output to DVD for others, or post online, at least you'll have the source video in it's best possible original format to work with.
This is an aside, but might be useful, I imported one tape at a time, let iM09 create a new event and split per each day. THen I renamed every event based on what the content was before doing the next tape. This really helps later on once yo realize you have a hard drive with 50 hours + of everything in your life on it. I included the year in the name in some way, for example, John's wedding 1994, Hawaii 2000, Hawaii 2004. Then I ended up drag/dropping Hawaii to one event.

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