Video Recorder

I would argue that using optical discs for backup is much safer than leaving them on magnetic tape as long as you don't use cheap media or store them in an area constantly bombarded by direct sunlight or prone to big temperature swings.

If you really want to store the information on a hard drive, you should look into fault tolerant raid solutions, otherwise if your drive were to fail it could be difficult or impossible to recover the data.

I would say you should think about just burning them to DVDs using a regular set top DVD recorder and then you could either rip .iso's of the discs to your hard drive for storage (could require a fair amount of space depending on quantity of tapes) otherwise you can convert them to .avi or another format (lot of time).

If you are really paranoid about the DVD's degrading or something then you could buy one of the more reputable brands of media and make multiple copies (using your PC after making the initial recording), storing them in more than one place.

Jam it back in, in the dark.