DV cam users with tape don't have so much choice.

For trecking around I made the choice to stay with MPEG2 and a pocket of tapes, rather than a HDD which might throw up a 'bad format' death message.

You're right about making sure the transfer from HDD to PC is COPY and not move. I learned that with still pic. transfers. No interface is 100% perfect every time handling big file transfers and an original still left on the HDD is better than half a corrupt file transferred to a PC.

Now there's a thing, after you transferred a whole shoot, how do you know it's error free before you wipe the camera HDD? I've seen JPEG stills transfer with no apparent Windows file error, only to find corruption when a file is opened and decoded. I now open up a thumbnail browser with stills, but does file corruption occur with movie files?