MiniDV for Backup?

I have a MiniDV camcorder, which I hook up to my computer to do video editing. (I wish it was as good as that sounds. What I really do is edit all the good ‘takes’ together and add a title so no one has to sit through hours and hours of Sam.

The camcorder connects to the PC via a FireWire cable. (That’s a really fast connection, for those of you who haven’t heard of it.) Then the computer can access the tape in the camcorder to copy the video onto my hard drive, and later to put the edited video back onto a tape. Each tape holds an hour of DVD-quality video

Each tape holds something like 12GB of data (1 hour of digital video at about 216MB per minute — someone correct me if I’m wrong). So I wonder if there’s a way to use MiniDV tapes for system backup. Either someone could make a drive that takes the tapes the way the old Colorado tape backups used to work, or someone could create software that lets you use your camcorder as a backup drive.

Either way, I think the cheap price and ubiquity of those tapes make this a decent idea.