Back up movies

[funxus]

Last christmas we bought a DV-camera, which we brought on our holiday so that we could make a movie of it later. We've now taken the time to edit capture the movie to our computer and edit it, and also to burn it on a DVD without losing too much quality. My experience of most digital mediums is that they won't hold more than a decade. So, how do we best back up the movie so that we'll be able to keep it for 50+ years (theoretically) without losing the quality.

One idea is to buy two new harddrives to keep our movies on, and when one of them breaks, we buy two new ones and copy the movies there. Is there a better way?

To not waste too much space, I'd like to save the compiled DVD-movie as a file(s) on the hard drive, instead of using the 4 h original uncut movie, so which files do I save, the VOB-files? What else do I need to keep to be able to burn them on a DVD? Which program should I use to burn them? I have Nero 5.5, and our video editing program (pinnacle 8).

It'll cost quite a lot of money to buy two large HDs, so if there's a smarter cheaper way to back up, I'd be pleased if someone could point it out.

 

[Turner]

What's "Quite a lot of money?" Hard drives are cheap, if you know where to look. www.pricewatch.com has some really good prices. EIDE 100 gig hard drives are going for about $68. I realize that it may be difficult to get an extra 140 bucks for two hard drives. . . but there may be other options for you.

I think your idea about the dual hard drives (RAID1? That's the way I'd go. Especially if you can hot-swap them.) is a pretty good one. And with hard drives getting cheaper and cheaper, and with more storage space, you could expand on the RAID1 with more than two drives.

You could try finding a data wearhousing company in your area, and ask them about long term storage. You may even be able to buy a package where they maintain the media, and then you don't have to worry about it. Of course. . .something could happen to the data. But I'd contact them and find out the best way to do long term storage. Tape comes to mind, but I'm not sure how long those last. And if you did dump them onto a SuperDLT tape (with about 100gig storage each), then you'd have to worry about migrating the data, should the formats ever change. And they will change, eventually.

 

[bobgote]

If you want, you can always compress the video files using a format like divx or something. You can get decent quality still in a 700MB file rather than a 4GB file. and yeah i think its the vobs that you use, i'm sure any ripping/encoding/burning application will take care of that for you.

 

[funxus]

I agree hard drives are cheap nowadays, but it's still $200 (in Sweden) to buy two 120GB HDs. I'll check up on RAID-1, I've heard of it, but don't really know what it is. The data warehouse also sounds interesting, I haven't heard of any in the area, but I could check it up.

It seems as if the files only are 4GB per 1 hour edited video, so maybe we'll just buy one new HD, and use the original HD to backup it up until we need the space.

Thanks for the answers.

 

[Turner]

Raid1 is when you have two drives that mirror each other. I think they need to be the same drive, but it just may be the same size. What's written to one is written to the other.

Raid0 is Drive stripping, where many physical drives create one logical drive. And yes, you can combine the two.

It can get really expensive, but if you have a network you can hook up a SAN - Storage Area Network. Usually these drives are one of the RAID configurations. And I don't know about Windows, but when I was an Operator on an OpenVMS platform that used these, you could hotswap them, and OpenVMS would find the new drive, and mirror it to the other drives on the fly. This created less down time for us, and also gave us the ability to mirror more than one drive. We were using three, I think, one primary and two backups.

Anyways, that solution may be more money than you want to spend. Understandable, that's a lot of money to preserve some discs.