I would still prefer a tape for shipment offsite. The reason? No impact of mechanical forces!

Secondly, tapes have stood the test of time. Optical disks are a good alternate, but I am not sure if anyone has ever tried to recover 10 year old business critical backup from an optical disk.

My home backup strategy is to have two external drives for regular monthly backups. The laptop's data goes into the desktop every week, and then every month, that is flushed on to the external drives. Every year, I copy it over to optical disks. Heavy-weights (videos/music/pictures) which are also available on the desktop are removed from the external drives and only the essential work/study data remains ready for a new year.