What storage solution is the cheapest and holds the most information? What storage solution is most easily broken/lost? If you said tape, you are the winner! Come on down! You are one of the few who understand why it's so important to get your tapes transferred to a digital media! Tape, whether it's video tape or audio tape, has been around since the late 70's (8 track even earlier). The popularity of tape made it very easy to buy and easy to store information. It was cheap and easily accessible to consumers.
It helped spawn the consumer recording era we now take for granted. Would the DVR have ever been created if we never had to fast forward our VHS tape through commercials?
Easily recorded onto, cheap, and readily available. There has to be a catch right? What we (yes I am old enough to remember the VHS days) didn't realize back then was how fragile our information was. It wasn't until years later when our tapes started to break that we realized tape wasn't the best storage medium. Even if our tape didn't break, eventually our audio tape started to sound funny or the VHS tapes started to look weird. Unlike the digital media we have today, like CDs and DVDs, tape degrades and when that tape degrades the information we have stored degrades with it.
Because tape is so fragile and can break at any moment, it is extremely important to transfer your tapes to digital. If not, your precious memories could forever be lost.