VHS Capturing - Storage?

[cmic2002]

So I finally had a bout of inspiration again and tried fiddling with Vdub again, and I finally got it to function and capture with my hardware! I have been capturing 8mm tapes thus far (need to replace a fuse in my SVHS deck for that to start working again), 480p, Lagarith lossless codec, and the amount of space being used is absolutely insane! I've already gone through over 2.5tb, and by the end by my estimation with how long each tape is, I will end up with around 14tb of raw video, before I create a master edit that's been deinterlaced and all that. I want to keep my original captures though of course, in case I want to reprocess differently for whatever reason in the future.
I am pretty tight on money, but plan to get two ~20tb HDDs and put one full copy of the raw footage on each. Anyone want to share what they do to archive their footage, out of curiosity?
This just makes me wonder though how anyone was able to hold on to their raw footage, especially 20+ years ago with how small hard drives were then. Anyone around back then want to share their method?

[Sharc]

This just makes me wonder though how anyone was able to hold on to their raw footage, especially 20+ years ago with how small hard drives were then. Anyone around back then want to share their method?

Keeping the tapes in a safe place (and still keeping them there, even after lossless digitization when storage space became available and affordable).
(To find a tape player in good working condition may be the bigger problem these days than the condition of the tapes).

[cmic2002]

This just makes me wonder though how anyone was able to hold on to their raw footage, especially 20+ years ago with how small hard drives were then. Anyone around back then want to share their method?

Keeping the tapes in a safe place (and still keeping them there, even after lossless digitization when storage space became available and affordable).
(To find a tape player in good working condition may be the bigger problem these days than the condition of the tapes).

I was referring to the lossless digital copy of the raw footage, if they were taking up the project of digitizing them back then xP

[ozymango]

This just makes me wonder though how anyone was able to hold on to their raw footage, especially 20+ years ago with how small hard drives were then. Anyone around back then want to share their method?

Back in the old days when I first started capturing videotapes, I only had a handful of tapes I really wanted to save, so maybe a couple dozen hours of footage -- I just saved it all to whatever hard drives I had, and then kept adding drives when I could afford them. Now I had an advantage in that I used to work for universities so whenever they upgraded a computer lab, I could usually pick up a bunch of drives pretty cheap, though this was also in the days before USB external drives so I had to keep swapping out IDE drives in my computer(s). I got really good at that and at labeling my drives! But still a lot of work, though again I think I fit all my home video on maybe three or four 80gb drives. And then when I got bigger drives, and especially after we got SATA drives and external USB2 drive enclosures (hallelujah!) I just kept moving my video from the smaller drives, to bigger drives.

And I still have about two dozen hard drives with all sorts of crap on them, that I have mostly consolidated into a handful of really big NAS drives -- but I can never bring myself to reuse the old drives anymore, I just leave everything on them so I have backups of backups, which maybe I'll need one day ... but mostly I just like to have backups of backups. Not that I can ever find the file(s) I'm looking for when I want to find them, though!

Today I just have one big NAS system, running OMV (Open Media Vault) that holds a few WD Red spinner drives, and I back those drives up with a couple more WD Red spinner drives, that I then keep on a shelf in the garage, in case the house burns down, knock wood that doesn't happen. So all my photos and videos I've collected over the years are instantly available on my home network, plus backed up off-line, and for any serious long-term digital archiving, I'm very happy with WD Red drives, my OMV NAS is on 24/7, has been running 24/7 since 2022, and not one bit of data loss yet. Again knock wood!

And of course I keep all my old video tapes in their original boxes, on a shelf in my computer room/office, and if somebody comes out with yet another fun way to digitize my tapes into better quality digital copies, I'll be happy to try out whatever cool tools people come up with next.

[aramkolt]

Can't speak to it because I wasn't doing captures 20+ years ago, but I imagine most people weren't doing lossless captures 20 years ago. I believe that DVD/MPEG2 capture systems were more common and those would take up more like 2-5GB per hour. DV probably wasn't super uncommon either, and that'd have been around 13GB per hour. Then there was still the elgato back then that was around 2.5GB/Hr (which clearly isn't ideal).

[jagabo]

You can use a program like FreeFileSync to keep the two drives synchronized. Also use it to verify the files periodically -- ie read the file's contents and make sure both drives match.

[dellsam34]

I can't speak for your, but most people have only few hours of valuable footage that want to keep lossless, the rest are other materials that are not that important to keep in lossless, just edit, encode and save, Maybe you've been shooting your life daily and have an insane amount of tapes, even then I wouldn't want to keep all of it lossless, Only the precious moments, otherwise you will start to worry about the materials saved from a head crash so you would need another set of hard drives for redundancy purposes.