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I looked at bluray for backups, but decided it wasn't all that great. Price per TB is too high, storage per disk is too small, and it's kind of slow.

I've found that LTO tape is great for backups. Used LTO5 drives can be had relatively cheaply on ebay, and so can the tapes. I pay about $5.50/Terabyte for tapes. I paid about $150 for the LTO5 tape drive and about $30 for a SAS HBA card. Overall it's way cheaper than hard drive storage, and LTO5 writes at 140MB/s which is far faster than bluray which has a max write speed of 54MB/s. Tapes are said to have greater than 30 years lifespan, so I'm not likely to outlive my tape backups at this point.

More so than HDDs fail?

Yes, supposed to go dead after a year+ unplugged.

So do optical disks.

Supposed to go dead after a year+ unplugged. My burnt CDs from ‘97 working fine.