Long term storage media

[pchan]

Hi All,
This is my personal opinion on long term storage of videos. While tapes are durable if stored in dry cabinet, but the video8, hi8 and miniDV drives are getting scarce. Once there is no camcorder, the tapes cannot be read. As for optical drives, these are CD, DVD and blu-ray discs. The 50GB or 100GB discs are ideal for storing uncompressed videos. A 50GB can store up to 3.8 hours of uncompressed video. Blu-ray burners are still plentiful as well as its replacement parts. SSD is another alternative e.g. USB A/C SSD thumb 1 or 2TB but not cheap due current RAM shortage.

While there is still time, transfer all the camcorder tapes to optical media or SSD.

[lingyi]

Your advice about the necessity of transferring/preserving analog media of all types is to spot on! However best practice (as discussed here and elsewhere numerous times) is to maintain multiple copies of your files on different storage media / types and continually check, copy and store in different locations/environments. In theory, digital (i.e. binary) information can be stored indefinitely.

I highly recommend visiting www.reddit.com/r/datahoarder as long term data storage is continually discussed there.