If your tape breaks, you can splice it, losing only certain files. Solid state memory and optical disks do not have that option.

[Bismarck] Don't they splice themselves?

Spectacular thunderstorm here. Some of the lightning made the scene look like daylight. Not all that much rain, surprisingly.

What Rosie said, but with a very hefty downpour of rain followed by a few hours of drizzle.

[Rakk] My understanding is that discs can recover lost blocks if they are in the right sort of configuration, and Flash has hardware redundancy built-in for its peculiar fail modes, so I guess the answer is "Yesnabe".