I've read bits and pieces about storing videos in various threads but what is the majority opinion on this? I've heard some people like copying to HDD and some say stick with the tape until something better comes around. What do you guys do?

I have about 30 or so Digital8 tapes stored away, some are around 10 years old. I haven't touched them since they where shot. I'm concerned that when the day comes that I want to do something with them, I won't have any video to see or the quality will be degraded too badly.

Going forward, I just bought the HV20 and I now need a method for preserving video I'm going to shoot on minidv as well.

I thought copying everything to HDD was the way to go but importing into Movie Maker imports as AVI files and I read that this is transcoded from the HDV format which loses some video quality. With something like Pinnacle, can I import as native mpeg-2 to not lose anything from the tape? Will the files still be around 13GB? And if this is the way to go, what do you guys do about backing up the HDD? Does it make sense to buy 2 500GB HDD, import from tape, and make duplicate copies on each HDD or is this more $$$ than it's worth?

BTW - I plan to shoot everything from here on out in HDV.