It was surprisingly common, though due to the cost of buying tapes, it wasnt as common as it is now.

VHS tapes have this nifty feature where you could store video on it in 3 different formats. While the tape from the rental place was stored in the format that fit roughly 2hrs on a tape, you could record three 2hr movies to a tape if you used the lower quality EP format (I think that was the acronym).

This lead to people like my friend's dad keeping shelves of tapes with hastily scrawled labels on them for 3 different movies or 6 different episodes.

All you needed for any of this was 2 VCRs, which from the early 90s were pretty affordable.