Home movie backup

[mickeyd125]

I have old (1988) home movies on VHS tapes that I am now downloading into my computer and using to create DVD movies. These videos are extremely valuable to me (videos of the kids growing up) and I want a reliable backup of the DVD movies I am creating.

I would like a medium that gives me the capability of still being able to edit the videos. (I don't think I can do this if I just make a second copy of the DVD's I am making now.)

One suggestion I have already received is to use digital tape to back up my DVD movies.

Is this best medium for me to use?

Is there a better medium?

mickeyd

[Tommyknocker]

The quality versus the price it is a good choice, in my opinion.

[holistic]

....home movies on VHS tapes that I am now downloading ....

Downloading??! - capture/transferring . Which one are you doing : Analog or Digital A/D transfers? Question becomes apparant later.

...These videos are extremely valuable to me ...... .....would like a medium that gives me the capability of still being able to edit ...

For analog (or digital for that matter) I advise on the purchase of another harddrive to store the 'original' copies. Sure DV tape is an option but a spare harddrive is far more convient, and gives better editing capabilities.

DV transfers take up ~13Gb for every hour. Analog much more if done at high "quality" settings.
Suggest Storing your 'original' on disk then at your leisure making 60 minute 9000bit MPEG2's as backups. (Although not as good as the original these DVD's can easily be stored off site in case the harddrive ever fails)
If you have the money (after all you cannot repace memorys) two harddrives with the identical video stored in different locations is an optimal idea.

][

[DaveS]

hard drives aren't advisable for long term storage.

[holistic]

hard drives aren't advisable for long term storage.

Says you.

2 Gb from my original P133 still in running condition. (coming up 8 years now). 830Mb from an old 486 - gotta be 10+ years and still works !.

Harddrives are currently the best $$value for large data storage for the consumer.
I did suggest 2 drives.
10 years from now there will proberly be a different storage medium, but the backwards compatability (ie: large PC base ) of harddrives make them a good option.

][

[DaveS]

hard drives aren't advisable for long term storage.

Says you.

2 Gb from my original P133 still in running condition. (coming up 8 years now). 830Mb from an old 486 - gotta be 10+ years and still works !.

Harddrives are currently the best $$value for large data storage for the consumer.
I did suggest 2 drives.
10 years from now there will proberly be a different storage medium, but the backwards compatability (ie: large PC base ) of harddrives make them a good option.

][

that's just what's said for hard drives, not by me but by others. I do respect your opinion, and I'm not saying you won't have terriffic luck w/ it and cost/mb could be very good. But I've also heard of (and had) HD failures, so it was just one other 'data point' for consideration.

[holistic]

Intresting point of view DaveS.
As a matter of intrest, what media would you recommend ?

Please don't say DVD, that would just put me in a fit of laughter when you consider the amount of people who 'back up' their DVD's. Must be they don't have faith in the medium.

regards ][

[DaveS]

I'm not sure what media I would 'recommend'...I can say that a box for one of my 1/2 in DLT tapes says 30 years archival and 1 million head passes so that sounds pretty good to me (35 gig uncompressed / 70 gig compressed on this tape). Generally, people probably use tape for most backup / 'archival' although I would think DVD archival would be good too (I know you said not to say that). Using tape also means that your tape drive must still work and be compatible w/ things down the road, otherwise you can't read your tape (same for DVD). Sorry for such an equivocal answer (!); other comments would be appreciated as well.

[MysticE]

Use HD's for long term storage? What planet are you from? The road to hell is lined sky high with dead HD's. The people who specialize in recovering bad data from fried HD's (for outrageous costs) will love that route. I guess HD's will work, if you treat them like any other backup media, load your stuff, pull the drive and store it in a safe location. If that is what you meant.

The term 'backing up DVD's' is an obvious euphemism (to most people at least) for what is considered illegal on many forums. It has nothing to do with people's faith in the format.

[mickeyd125]

I've found a solution to the question that I originated.

Burn your movie onto a DVD RW disk. You can download the video files from the DVD RW disk onto your hard drive and from the hard drive load your movie files into your editing software. Once in your editing software, you can edit the files just as you could when you originally "captured" your video onto your hard drive.

I've done this with Roxio DVD Creator 6. I've read in reviews that you can also do this with Ulead Movie Factory 2. (See: http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/Ulead_DVD_MovieFactory_2_0/4505-3513_16-20825130.html?tag=pdtl-list )

You have this capability with DVD RW only. You cannot download your video files nor edit them using DVD+R and DVD-R disks.

My plan is to burn videos that I might modify later onto DVD RW disks. For mass production and any other videos, I'll go the cheaper route of DVD+R disks.

mickeyd

[Roundabout]

I'm inclined to go with what Holistic said, because the MTBF ratings of hard drives are ratings of usage of the drive, and when it's stored for extended periods of time, it's not in use. I had a hard drive on my laptop go south on me after only 2 1/2 years, and it wasn't even on that much. However, laptop drives are much smaller and more fragile than the standard drives in Desktop PC's and more prone to failure.
I have other drives that I've stored for years and come up running with no problem at all - because they haven't been run all those years, they could last a very, very long time. Keep them from extreme heat/cold and I'd be quite confident that they would last for years.

More about MTBF:

Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is calculated by taking a batch of equipment and seeing how many units fail during a given period of time. If, for example, you took 1,000 hard drives, ran them for 100 hours and had one drive fail, that would give an MTBF of 100,000 hours (1,000 units x 100 hours = 100,000 MTBF hours). If you had one failure in 200 hours, it would yield an MTBF of 200,000 (1000 drives x 200 hours = 200,000 MTBF hours); one failure in 300 hours would give an MTBF of 300,000 (1,000 drives x 300 hours = 300,000 MTBF hours) and so on.

Predicting Failures Based on MTBF:

Using an MTBF of 100,000 for example: If you bought 1,000 of the drives you could then expect one drive to fail every 100 hours (100,000 MTBF hours divided by 1,000 hard drives = 100 hours). If you bought 100 drives one could be expected to fail every 1,000 hours (100,000 MTBF divided by 100 drives = 1000 hours); with 200 drives, one would fail every 500 hours (100,000 MTBF hours divided by 200 units = 500 hours); with 300 drives one would fail every 333.3 hours (100,000 MTBF hours divided by 300 drives = 333.3 hours).

This doesn’t mean that you can take one hard drive and run it for 100,000 hours. The MTBF figures only apply to the first year of operation, and there are less than 9000 hours in a year. But the MTBF rating does provide a comparative quality rating. If for example one hard drive had a rating of 100,000 hours and another was rated at 200,000 hours, it doesn’t mean that the second one would last twice as long, but that the second one would fail half as often in the first year.

[willy_annand]

Media?

Hard drives - no, life span is short 10-15 years, (90 days if you have windows on it and are using it).

VHS tape - no, life span is short 10-15 years.

1/2" Digital tape has 30 years life, but are expensive as is the equipment to run it.

Best medium is DVD-R

This is what I use exclusively, I copy the source to the computer (Analog Capture or Firewire transfer).

Author and test the DVD. When I and my client(s) are happy with the results, I Burn a data DVD-R with the VIDEO_TS folder only. This becomes my archival backup. For the client I burn it to a DVD-R, print the client's custom case inserts and label and give him a professional product.

If something goes wrong with his original, I have an archival backup here in the studio.

[Roundabout]

Hard drives - no, life span is short 10-15 years, (90 days if you have windows on it and are using it).

Not sure I understand your response. The life span of a Hard Drive is 90 days if you have Windows on it and are using it???
That's the first time I've heard that, having Windows on your drive shortens the life to 90 days. Someone better call Bill...I see some lawsuits coming

My suggestion is the same as Holistic, that you store the data on the drive and DON'T RUN it until you need it, as you are storing information on it for later use. You don't leave it in your PC and run it for years, you remove it and store it in an appropriate place. It should last for many, many years in this case. Nothing is guaranteed to last forever, anyway. If you can say that DVD-R's will last for X years and guarantee it, I think I'd tend not to believe that. Bad dye lots, excess heat, warping, etc. could throw a monkey wrench into keeping it on DVD-R or other optical media.
If, however, after a certain amount of years you are getting concerned with the data, you can always transfer it from one hard drive to a new one, and in 15 or 20 years, who knows what kind of storage medium we'll all be using? You would just transfer it to the new medium and be done with it for more years.

[SenorDogoLoco]

1st backup = the original tape ... once you have the footage on DVD, you won't be using the tape anymore, so stuff it in a box in a closet where it will last for decades ... I expect the capture technology in 20 years will far surpass the loss of quality from the tape sitting around.

2nd backup = a second copy of the DVD-R ... also set aside so you dont actually use it. Yes, you can rip the footage back off of the DVD to a VOB anytime you want. Then there are a variety of ways to convert/edit/etc. if needed.

Harddrive = even if you had redundancy such as a RAID configured server (3-5 harddrives backing each other up), you still do not have a reasonable permanent backup without another removable/portable media source.

If they are THAT important, also consider finding an "offsite" storage location for at least one backup copy. That is what we do in the corporate world with extremely important information.

[willy_annand]

Hard drives - no, life span is short 10-15 years, (90 days if you have windows on it and are using it).

Not sure I understand your response. The life span of a Hard Drive is 90 days if you have Windows on it and are using it???

Not the life span of the drive itself, just the data.
We all know how reliable Windows is, it can corrupt itself so easily causing a format and reinstall. Once you format, you have lost your archival data.

[overloaded_ide]

You have this capability with DVD RW only. You cannot download your video files nor edit them using DVD+R and DVD-R disks.

What??
I geuss I totally mis-understand what your trying to say here! You can easily copy any data from DVD +r or -r to your hard drive and edit it all you want! Then you burn back to a new disks and keep your master disks as they were without changes! We do this all the time! It's comonly referred to as ripping when done with comercail disks, or even homemade ones
It seems many people refferr to any type of copying of data as downloading, so maybe that's what you meant maybe not? Myself consider downloading to be getting files downloaded from the NET but transfering data to the hard drive is just copying data. I just mention that for clarity.

Hard drives are NOT decent long term storage, period!
Drop a DVD of any format on a hard surface and you can normally wipe the dust/dirt off it and it works just fine! Sometime you may get a scratch or chip and it's trash, but then again you may even be able to polish that scratch out and make it work.
Drop a hard drive!!

Put a disk next to a strong magnet for awhile, now try a hard drive!

Walk across thick carpet in your socks and grab a disk who cares, do the same thing and cry when you see the arc snapping to your hard drive!

I have a 260 mb segate drive that's been through hell and works great in an old system still, but I lost a very well cared for 1gig drive for no reason! It was packed away perfectly safe from any harm, but it has a ton of noise when it tries to run and the system won't even see it there.
Had a 13gig WD drive less than 6 months old, started the system one day and all my files scrambled on that drive for no reason, I lost them all on that drive when it was RMA'd for a new one! Luckily I had backup files on other media!

Hard drives are never ever a decent long term storage media for any reason, they can go bad just sitting there without any damage!

DVD disks of whatever format are by far the best solution! Make several copies perhaps on several brands of media for extra saftey!
The main reason many of us make LEGAL backups is because disks can be damaged in use! Drop them, close a tray on one, kid sits it on a shelf in direct sun, etc.. etc.. Or read my post about spraying bug spray on my warcraft cd It was laying on the floor behind a box and I didn't see it had fallen there.

Or for traveling, I carry backups not the real disks! If it lost, stolen, destroyed so what, I am out a $1 disk not $20 movie!!
Example, I recently had a flat tire in near total darkness. Couldn't see in the trunk very well, and when I tossed the flat tire back in I crushed 3 of the disks that had fallen in the area the tire fits. I lost $3 of DVD -r not $60 of movies!
Should not be that type of problem with backup data stored in a safe place

Second best option would be Backup tapes. But they have many faults also. Can go bad, magnitizism, get ate by the drive. Though not as bad as audio cassettes or VHS/Beta, a tape is a tape and they all have the same problems basically!
I still have my backup tapes from about 9 years ago. I would check to see if they still work but I dought W2k Pro or XP would reconize that old tape drive and I don't know if it even still works! And I know for certain I can not buy another one new! So what good are the tapes??

Personally what I would do (and I do) is record the raw files to DVD -R on at least 2 different brands of high quality disks. You then have a second set if one goes bad for any reason.
I only burn backup disks to 4 gigs, helps avoid any problems at end of disk you hear about with cheap media. $1 for a good Ritek disk, why push the limit? 100 gigs of DVD media is far cheaper than a 100gig drive or tape unit and tapes!
So for $100 you have 400 gigs of disks, burn lots of copies
Then check them ocassionally and make sure none are going bad. Or once in awhile just burn new fresh copies to be sure!

Most of the stuff I really care about losing are smaller type files that fit CD's and that's how I have backed those up for years! Just burn several copies on various brands of CDR and every so often I use them, so I know they still work.

Now we have 4gig DVDR which should be better and holds more, soon we will have newer larger, but just like Cd's we will be able to use the DVD we have now for many more years. DVDR as we have it now won't go away as fast as my tape drive did, just like CDR hasn't yet!