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Can You Back Up Data On Audio/Visual Media?
O enrique asks: "Since digital video is becoming a popular issue, I wonder when would we put in practice the possibility to do file backup (non audiovisual data storage) into digital tapes using those firewire enabled cameras. Each 1 hour tape (less than 10$) stores more than 10 Gbytes of data! As far as I know, nowadays Linux is only able to grab data from such devices, but not to store into them. Well, it seems that some people already thought about it, but I've seen nothing complete. See the Web pages
here and
here. Is someone else interested on it?"
So now I could view all of my data in just 1 hr! Some movie, huh!
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
On the up side, this would be a nifty hack, if it will work. Now, the only remaining thing to do is to get that there mp3 player thingee to read these cards.
sig not found
I remember a while back there used to be a system that pressed a standard VCR into service as a backup system. The data was recorded as a black and white pattern in the video, and that was recorded on the tape. A special cable was attached to the serial port and the data could then be retrieved. At least that's how the Amiga version worked :)
I'm sure it would be possible to make it work; the question would be at what cost (would new hardware be required? Those cameras I don't think were made to accept video from their USB ports, were they?), and the effort involved (Spend a fortune to save a nickel?)
Jeff
Jeff
I believe my C64 could do this.
Or you could record an actual modem, like Information Society did.
But if you were sane, you'd just buy backup tapes instead. Or for that matter, use RAID-5.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Anybody else here remember using a tape recorder to upload/download software onto a PET, TRS-80, or an Apple II? And when you were loading a program, sometimes you weren't quite sure if the loading sequence had worked until it got to the end and you entered RUN.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
That would be SOOO cool, but does a digital camera guarantee the storage of each and every bit? I mean, for a home video of my infant daughter burping milk all over her mother or something it hardly matters if a few bits (pixels) get dumped, but for most files this would be a total disaster. A comprehensive error-checking and correcting facility would have to be employed for this to have any use, IMHO. The idea was employed a while back with VHS tapes, but failed because of the high error rates...
Black holes are where God divided by zero
There are linux utils for working with firewire - specifically to a mini-DV device. Why can't we just change what we send the writing tool data out of tar or cpio?
FIND IT
My concern with this method of storage is that of the reliability of the media. Since the tape is wrapped around itself on the spool, it tends to interfere with itself over time. I've seen this happen with regular recorded television programs on tapes losing clarity over time. It just seems to convoluted of a plan to store data. It'd be to unreliable for a corporate environment, which would prefer better systems, and slightly too expensive (if you don't have a camera and firewire connection) and complicated for home use.
http://www.ajwm.net/backfire/ The server has detected that you are using a browser that is incompatible with Internet standards (probably Microsoft Internet Explorer). The server is programmed to deny requests from such browsers.
I've backed up a couple of times to CDRW, but haven't found a way that is convenient or easy to restore. Recommendations anyone?
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
A long time ago, I was at Greenbrier's Radio observitory and saw a VCR sitting in a rack. I asked what it was doing, and the guy replied that it was for recording data from the scope.
"Hm?" I said.
It turns out that they had sitting in the back of some 286 PC a card which would output digital signal over RCA cables and feed them to a VCR, which they would then mail the tape to Califoria. Damn cheap too.
Now why hasn't anyone out there made a standard 'backup' device akin to a VCR or Super 8 is beyond me.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I've seen people working on this (not on a *nix platform, just the concept in general).. unfortunately I seem to recall the built in error correction in all the dv devices screws you up. Since its expected video data, you basically end up reading a whole bunch of "Bad data" off the tape (as far as the device is concerned) and it screws you over.
One alternative would be to encode the data inside a d-1 format video and write it to tape that way, but then you're not accomplishing a whole lot over using VHS or just buying a darn tape backup. Heh.
I got a good laugh out of it.
Several years ago there was a gizmo that could plug into a computers serial(?) port and dump data to a VCR. It never caught on, but if you could find one, I bet it would be a good place to start.
Wish I could even remember the name of the package . . .
WHONEEDSSLEEPWHENWEHAVECAFFINE?!
My old Exabyte 8200 uses standard 8mm video tapes which will fit 2.5GB. There's actually a sony 8mm mechanism in there very similar to what they used in camcorders...
And everytime it comes up, it usually comes down to this:
FireWire is just a transport medium that can send data to a camera to put on the tape. That data follows a certain format, so you would have to put the timecode and other required fields in there, and then where the image data normally is, somehow put your data in there, as if it is already compressed DV data. Of course, it'd also be handy to have something that'll read it back off as well.
You'd probably be better off if someone designed a tape drive that used the miniDV tapes to hold the data, like the 8mm drives - it's a video, it's a data backup!
Check this and this
I got a Sony DCR-TVR315 NTSC and it's specified in the owner's manual that we can't do this. They don't say why...
Maibe because it's written on normal 8 mm tape and this is becomes a lossy format after a couple of years.
GFK'sIf you're serious enough to back up your data in the first place, would you trust the integrity of a hack to write to a digital camera ?
The data rate's not even appealing : A Sony AIT2 backs up to 25Gb (uncompressed), 50Gb (compressed) at 12Mb/s. That's enough for your home user. In a pro enviroment, Sony DTF2 gives you 200Gb uncompressed at 24Mb/s.
Early on, many discovered that they could use DAT audio tapes in their DAT backups with just a few modifications.
A little later on, many discovered that DAT audio tapes had nothing like the quality of DAT backups. One bit in a million is an acceptable error rate for an audio DAT. Even with matrix row/column checksumming and similar space-eating data safeguarding schemes, one bit in a million can be disasterous.
If these video cameras follow the model of digital music devices, they are going to be quite forgiving of errors in the media. It's easy to fudge a few bits here and there when you only need to be accurate enough to fool a human ear through a couple thousandths of a second, or a human eye for 1/60th.
I'll be wary of this until someone can verify that a situation similar to that of DATs doesn't exist here.
Tape backup devices? Hello??
I mean, magnetic storage is around here for quite a long time.
There were the Sinclair Spectrum, the C64 and others that used ordinary audio cassettes, using quite an interesting method - some kind of modem that is.
The same way, there was that Amiga to VCR thing, I also remember reading about it sometime during 1993 or 94.
So aren't we over-hyping digital tape recording. Of course there are some nice new toys like the Thomson D-VHS VCR or Sony Digital 8 (digital recording on 8mm tape - at twice its normal speed), but recording digital on analog magnetic media has been around since before I was born.
Now, about that anti-IE website. I think it takes a lot of nerve. Webstandards? -=Iframe=- is a web standard. Where is it in Netscape4? And what about the extreme confusion Mozilla represents for webdesigners? As one, I play by numbers. My server logs show a 55% IE4 and higher share (and I think that's quite low if you take all of the web), so IE must be my priority when designing webpages, unless I don't want my pages to be seen by as many visitors as possible. As I do want them to be seen, designing for IE has been a priority roughly since Windows98 and its bundled IE4 came out, and I am nicely surprised how IE evolves smoothly and (no one can deny it) how MSDN documentation almost rules as much as OReilly's *grin. But what about Netscape? In some high-tech websites where I needed split IE4 and NS4 versions, nothing, not even the NS4 version, works with Mozilla.6. That's just impossible.
Webstandards? Then everyone use Amaya! Else, the public is the only standard to go for.
Cheers,
| e.s.
I use my DC280 camera with the 48MB flashcard as a floppy disk to take stuff from work to home and vice versa, using the USB connector. But that flashcard stores the data as actual bits (in fact, compactflash is ATA media).
With the tape camera, the error correction will kill you. You're better (and much cheaper) off with just tapestreamer or CDR. Takes less CPU too.
GCS/MU d- s+: a- C++$ USH++$ P- L+> E W++$ N o-- K- W++@ O-- M- !V PS Y+ PGP- t+ 5(+) X- R tv? b++++ y++(+++)
My first Unix experience was with SCO running on a network (UUCP) of '286 machines. The admin used a card that connected to a VCR for backups.
It sort of worked, but was very unreliable.
I suspect that the meia would be fine, but VCR's aren't really designed for data.
Jim Buchanan
Hello folks
.zip, rename it to .avi and then store it on the cam, and vice-versa.
.30$ / 700 megs, doing parts would render the idea of one big 10 gig file useless for all the troubles.
My friend and I already though about that. Since it's very easy to do on Windows, we tought it would be a great way to do backup and/or exchange huge files. The simple idea was to do a big
The problem is to retrieve only a part. Even if it's theorically possible to go to a precise frame and then, do a kind of "fat" which we could store at the first frame or first second, since the data on cd-rom is becoming
The data rate for an AVI-DV is approx 3.5 Megs/sec, allowing 12.6 gig of total space.
I think seriously that such a way to backup should really remain for hack purpose, because dvd writer becoming available for normal people probably in 2002. The price of dvd-r will probably drop a lot then (as cd first were 3$ each, now less than 1/10 of it's original price), it will make that hack useless.
But eh, I'll try it tonight
But if you want to spend slightly less than a hundred grand on a tape format that is essentially dead, you'll want something else.
DVC-PRO is becomming pupular (translation: cheap) in spite of its inferior compression algorhythm (read: flaimbait) it would be a nice candidate for such a solution.
i am such a ho
Has anyone tried an 8 Track? I wonder how much data those would store. You could use it to back up just the last X minutes of something, and it would loop forever. It might be easier if someone made a store/retrieve that used the input/output of a soundcard, so you use any audio recording device.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Get a clue.
What is even more amazing is that this is the kind of bog-standard HTML that any web browser can handle, I can't see anything here that IE would have any trouble with. I think that with a pencil, and a copy of the W3 guidelines, my grandmother would provide a sufficient rendering engine. This is incredibly annoying,.
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
I have an attachment for one of my old ataris (maybe even the computer based one) that read data off an audio cassette. The only game I ever found for it was some geographical or world history thing or something. Can't find the thing right now, probably is next to my E.T. cart :P
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
Well I'm sure there is just one of those nice little drop downs for story posting and it probably just says Digital. And the poster probably knows little to nothing about Digital E.Q. which to my knowledge is still owned by Compaq and not "dead" as a previous poster was pointing out. They may not be making alphas any more but they could decide to start back up at any moment which makes them not dead, dormant maybe.
Strictly speaking, this article should not be under the Digial category, but something more general purpose. When people say digital, they're talking about the company DEC (COMPAQ), and not digital media. Well, it could have been worse. I'm surprised it wasn't spelled "degital" or something. Peace out.
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a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Hey guys, it's great to see someone in the tech community putting the earth first for once.
Our landfills have become clogged with decaying gifs of extinct corporate logos, and with the dotcom collapse, it's gettig worse. Combine this with the depletion of our natural swoosh reserves by short sighted marketers, and a crisis becomes imminent.
That's why it's good to see you lot reusing the digital logo.
For you young fellows out there, digital used to be the second largest computer manufacturer in the world.
--Shoeboy
http://www.anonymizer.org/surf_encoded/http://www. ajwm.net/backfire/
use anonymizer to hide your browser
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Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
http://www.ajwm.net/backfire/
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Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
They may not be making alphas any more but they could decide to start back up at any moment.
Apparently.
--Shoeboy
Colin
I seem to remember that someone made a device that encoded digital audio as an analog signal for recording onto a VCR (probably the same type of scheme used for putting data on there as well), turning it into a pre-DAT digital audio device. I remember reading about this system in an article on the gear Deadheads used for taping shows.
This place sells a complete deck for doing this, but looks to be more specialized (ie, it just uses the media rather than a standard VHS deck).
you can get 10GB of audio visual data OK.
But that's because the occasional bit error
is tolerable here. To get the required bit
error rate to required levels for "other"
data, you have to use a much larger resolution
on the tape.
Emm, don't you think the tape drive manafacturers
are already getting the best possible capacity?
RAID by itself is no substitute for backups. Sure, it protects against the failure of a disk, but what about other sorts of disasters, like bad RAID controller firmware, fire, flood, filesystem corruption, hostile intrusion, and so on?
Of course, there are still the biggest use of backups: user carelessness.
Of course, with the falling price of IDE drives, I have been thinking that it might be possible to build some IDE-RAID-based storage system that would rival tape libraries in cost/terabyte, but be much faster. (Maybe this is what you meant.) You could still make tapes for offsites and archives and such. Unfortunately, all the commercial products out there that do something like IDE RAID -> SCSI (which one might need to keep things simple) are way more expensive than their components would seem to justify, and I have no money, so it remains a pipe dream.
I suppose you could just get tons of pentium systems doing software RAID and NFS.... hmmmm.... this sounds like a job for those folks at NASA who brought us Beowulf (and all the "imagine a Beowulf cluster of [ ]" on Slashdot.
It's just an ego-massage for the poor spanner. What a R4D H4X0R D00D he must be.
Never mind. If he backs up to videotape, the site won't be around for much longer.
My Mom's company went cheapo and bought a bunch of A/V quality tapes instead of normal data quality tapes. They saved an enormous amount of money. Unfortunately the number of errors on the tapes doubled the backup time and made it impossible to restore.
Cheap is NOT the way to go for backups. Get quality backup media and use equipment with the best reliability you can find. Otherwise the time, effort, and money may be entirely wasted.
My first job after leaving college was looking after all the computers in an office of about 20 people. All the companies central and main systems ran on an "Alpha Micro" machine which yielded one page on the internet entitled "Obsolete Hardware". Most of the software for the machine was on tape (Exabyte) but some (which I never had to use) was on videotape. One day a new TV and video arrived in the building and guess what the only videos in the building were....So as soon as we tuned in the video we were looking at a black and white spaced table of I think 16x16 blocks at a rate of at most 4 blocks a second.....a grand total of 128kb/sec!
A simple demonstartion however of how this sort of a method with a firewire camera could certainly be used....it's just a question of what data-rate you can get!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
using the tape recorder with the good ol' Commodore-64 :-)
I have been able to backup data onto my audio DAT deck for the last 6 years on my NuBus PPC Macintosh with an audiomedia II digital audio card. I used this primarily for source digital audio file backups, but the program that digidesign inlcuded with their audiomedia II cards allows for you to backup 1GB of data onto a regular audio-only DAT tape, not bad for a $2 tape.
Mainframes and to a lesser extend minis had standardized on tape formats (reels, especially, had standard recording formats) and also on the "labels" written on the tapes to identify individual files. You could write an "IBM standard label" or "ANSI standard label" tape on one platform, transport it to another, and read it. The 2400-ft. reel of tape was the media standard, and usually they were recorded at one or another 9 track (1 track for parity) density- 800, 1600, or 6250 bytes per inch. This standardization drove the media cost and hardware cost downward. We need something like it again.
I bet they let Netscape 4 in...
The compression on DV is basically colorspace reduction. It is a loseless format and not an mpeg style affair. It is good enough for most things, the only problm being the area of broadcast TV where the lack of depth is quite apparent and it would really be a station dependant decision as to whether the piece was worth it. You can certainly use a DV camera for data-backup, the question is how much error correction would be required to ensure data security and what data rate would that leave?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
A minor point, but in the EU most DV-cams are only equipped with output as they would be classed as a video recorder otherwise and be subject to further taxation. I still find it unbelievable that the manufacturers chose to disable input rather than face the tax, but it means you have to "hack" the camcorder (devices are readily available) to record back on.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
They don't like Lynx either, the scum
If you're willing to experiment with using the wrong tool for the job, why not take a shot using the right, but used, tool? With a little bit of looking, you can find things like a 7/14GB tape drive for far less than a DV camera.
Is someone else interested on it?
I'm interested in this.. I've been looking for a good way to backup over at least 100GB on a home network. From the way this looks, it doesn't seem like it's my ideal solution because of the error rate..
Anyone else have any ideas? I've done the backup-to-cd plan a while back, but now that I have an entire network to backup, it'll quickly get very annoying. Is a tape drive my only solution?
Yeah, I remember having one of those boxes at BTX in the Boston area. Can't remember the particulars but I think the capacity was a lot better than most solutions at the time, although it was slow as hell.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Defective Browser:
Access denied: incompatible browser.
Ironically, should be inside
If Mozilla would fix some of the REALLY bad bugs it has (such as considering form fields with display: none as "non successful" (check the HTML 4 specs), being unable to properly refresh DHTML pages, using native scrollbars in XUL widgets (combo boxes), taking a window 3 seconds to open, losing bookmark names when copy & pasting, etc.) and if Mozilla would get fast enough to actually be usable, I'd love to switch. Until then, I'll stick with the #1 browser out there.
Opera has a lot of potential too and I'm looking forward to their next major release but the current version has too many layout and JavaScript implementation bugs to be usable.
Netscape 4.. There's no point in even mentioning the ways it sucks and is non-standards compliant but for the sake of the argument, let's mention IFRAME's, DOM, 85% of the CSS1 standard missing in the implementation, *horrible* table rendering performance and correctness, form widgets being native and thus not z-orderable, Java VM being barely 1.0.2 compatible with a buggy 1.1 AWT implementation... Like I said.. it sucks in too many ways to even mention.
Used a cassette tape as well...
This has been a test. If this had been an actual Sig, you would have been amused.
Is this media really usable for long storage and how reliable is it? If I encounter a small blip during a movie, this would just bug me a bit, but a missing file in a backup is a different thing. An example, where a technical solution for digital audio is also used for data storage is DAT and according to my experiences, this is far away from what I'd call reliable. Digital video tapes have about the same recording density and the the mechanical setup is also nearly the same. This backup solution (if someone will succeed in writing a driver) might have just the advantage of being cheap ...
I should have used "preview" on my previous post...
<html>
<title>Defective Browser:</title>
<body><h1>Access denied: incompatible browser.</h1>
Ironically, <title> should be inside <head>..</head> so the *page* is incompatible with Internet standards. Meanwhile....
Forget video! I want to backup my hardware on audio tapes!
What do you want to backup? Your pr0n? It would be cheaper just to get a porno tape....
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I seem to remember a Looooong time ago reading about the possibility of using Analog (^%^%$&%???) video cassetes for backup. They were discussing some weird possiblities, including a "software channel" on cable that you could set your VCR to record and use the tape to install software. Cool idea, but very difficult (and pointless) to do with analog. Since the free software movement came about and now with DAT, I can see this becoming a reality if someone saw a market for it. Does anyone remember this?
"You'll die up there son, just like I did!" - Abe Simpson
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I have a device in which my Commodore VIC-20 may store and retreive data from a standard phillips type audio casette storage unit! These devices may revolutionize the way in which we consumers store and retreive large amounts of data. No longer will only large corporations be able to afford tape storage devices! You can store your hangman and typing tutor BASIC programs on regular Audio Casettes you can buy from any fine audio specialty shop for only $10 each!
-My other computer is a Data General Nova 3.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I think that tape drives are a technology that deserves to go the way of the punch card. While everyone talks about the speed of backing up on such devices, the amount of time that it takes to restore from one is rarely mentioned. And for good reason - on many of these devices, doing a full restore of 5GB or more after a drive death will have you scratching your butt for days (yes, that's plural) waiting for the damn thing to finish. While it's better than no restore at all, I don't think many people recognize just how long their critical systems will be down. In my book, the only mechanism worth using for backing up a single large IDE drive is another IDE drive! With plenty of fast 40GB UDMA-3 drives popping up on Price Watch for well under $140, I decided that in the long run it is much more economical to put in one of those removeable IDE trays and back up to a second (or incrementally, a third or fourth when you look at the cost of a 40GB tape backup device) IDE drive.
Anyone wanna hire me, I'm very bored at my present job. The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
The Exabyte 8mm tape drive was very popular with small Vaxen. Held a couple of Gig on a camcorder tape, connected through a SCSI connection.
Worked well for backup, because you could usually get everything on one tape. The idea that you could walk off with the entire company in a shirt pocket was pretty revolutionary at the time as well.
Maybe (if this is not directly possible) you could encapsulate the raw data to be saved in video struct : this way, any software aimed at exploiting these data would "see" proper video whereas an eye would only see some "noise" ?
Why "if this is not directly possible" ? I once used my camera's 32Mb Smartmedia card to store MP3 in order to carry these between 2 laptops and it has been unusable since then.
That's why I guess there might be a problem with some types of data.
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
The Exabyte 5 GB tape backup unit used the same tapes and mechanism found in 8MM analog camcorders. I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen with the new media, also.
In the 1980's my Dad got an Exabyte drive for his VMS cluster at work (ca. 1Gb back then, I think). The big selling point was the ease of getting media: standard 8mm video tapes. He tested various brands until settling on a couple that produced consistently good backups. He's been able to recover decade+ old backups from those video tapes, much older than the oldest 9mm backup tapes that still work.
Eventually I bought an Exabyte drive for the lab I sys-admined as a grad student.
Of course, manufacturers would love to FUD-you into buying their "data-grade" tape, but the video tape works just as well most of the time. I think Fuji and Maxell were good brands, but I'll have to check with Dad first. I've got Exabyte backups on video tapes; it's a very good system. Just remember that nothing is forever: re-tape your media regularly (which does not mean often, just regularly).
Simply put: Backups are for wussies. Everything I need is available on the Internet on multiple servers - thats backup enough for me ;P.
;)
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
I also have a few years worth of Rainbow, micro-80, and i think CromoCassette. I still like to dig one out and flip threw all the old ad's. I have some of those floppy records that came in them that you had to tape them down on to your turntable and hook it up to the CASS port. On day ill fire my old CoCo back up and record everything to CD-R.
I have to return some videotapes...
One night somebody broke into the pawn shop, saw the VCR, pulled the tape out of it, turned to the camera, smiled and waved. He thought he had pulled the security tape. The cops had a real good picture of him which was more than enough to put him in jail for quite some time.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
8mm backup machines have been able to use regular tape for a long time. my experience has been that these backup tapes can not be depended on. you need data quality media that was designed for archival purposes. but this is old hat.
Personally, ever since I laid hands on a MiniDisk, I've often invisioned popping them into my pc instead of floppies... But then I have some weird ass thoughts..
There's a reason that DDS DAT cartridges are a lot more expensive than DAT audio tapes. They use a much finer grain of magnetic particle to lessen the chance of losing a stray bit of data. I'd imagine that the DV tapes have the same limits. It would be interesting to play with this though; perhaps some serious error checking could overcome the inherent weakness of the media. I know I have a DV camera & firewire and for some basic home archiving it might be fun. I'd still want to have a copy on CDR or something too, but that's just me.
i wonder if this occurs with the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer -- the browser that is more standards-compliant than Mozilla right now! (totally different codebase from the Windows version).
seems like they're pushing their anti-microsoft propaganda on everyone. don't they know that FUD stinks no matter who's using it?
- j
A few years ago I picked up a device that attached to the parallel port and the VCR hooked up to it. I think it was called a "backer"? The thing never worked. I tried a few high quality VCR's but the error correction always screwed up.
Oh well,..not like I do anything important enough to backup anyway.
change me
Using IE 5 on a mac I get the very same message. Kind of funny (sad?) since, as you say, it is one of the most standards compliant browsers available on any platform.
Sure, a second cheap hard drive is a great thing - get a $50 IDE RAID card and mirror your drive in case of failure. Mirroring does not allow you to do a number of things which tapes do, however. You can't have a daily/weekly/monthly backup cycle, which allows you to restore from a particular point in time. You can't easily store backups offsite (well, you can remove your drive easily with a tray, but it's not as convenient). For home use, ok, you're not backing up too often. For business settings you really want drive redundancy PLUS a good tape solution. I find that most tape restores aren't due to drive failures (I have redundant drives) but to "oops, I really need that file I deleted last week"; that's when you need your tapes.
Poor IE users cannot access the site, and are not smart enough to know it was a joke. A response to all the IE only sites out there.
As anyone who has used DV will tell you, consumer video tape isn't any better-it has plenty of dropouts etc. That's not to say anyone hasn't backed up data to digital video tape before, IIRC a oil company had modified D1 recorders (professional studio decks) to store geological data gathered from seismic and satellite surveys. But D1 decks are built again to much better specs.
A while ago, as someone else noted, there was an Amiga product that backed up onto VHS tapes. The way it worked was to record an NTSC pattern (since the Amiga had NTSC out) to tape, which was read in with a simple video digitizer attached to parallel port. It apparently worked relatively well. But that's not really digital recording, it's an analog form of a digital recording.
Calum
just use a tape drive, with data quality DATs? HP has made them for years.
sulli
RTFJ.
http://www.linuxalpha.compaq.com/sourceforge/proje ct/?group_id=6
Digital Video capture over IEEE on Alpha.
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www.alphalinux.org
www.alphalinux.org
What are you talking about? both Lynx and Links work just fine for me.
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Most of the digital AV formats are designed not to allow bit for bit storage and retreival. Because they do not want it to be used for storing AV in a perfectly copyable and playable format they will not want blank media on the market. They want to sell all media prerecorded. They learned that mistake from the Compact Disk. Never will an AV media be usable for binary storage due to CSS, DMCA, Etc. In short, you can't store a binary file in a format that can be directly played on a consumer player and expect to retrieve it intact unchanged. All new digital AV media will be in a proprietary format and protected to the fullest extent of the law.
The truth shall set you free!
Jesus, that is *so* 1997.
I thought everybody got over this browser superiority bit when they realized
that every browser sucks in it's own special way.
And don't give me this crap about Nutscrape being 'standards compliant', they did their share of embrace and extend.
This idiot needs to get a clue - don't exclude browsers, just write compliant HTML,
and if you're gonna take a stand against standards
violation, do it in a way that affects the company violating the standards, not the user that
may contribute to your project. A stupid 'denied' page is not going to get me to switch browsers -
it's just going to make me hit the 'Back' button.
--K
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old serial (intended for amiga) video backup ntsc decoder. http://www1.omnitel.net/savel/amiga/hardware.html that was one, back in the amiga days, the VBS - Video Backup System, did very reliable backups at about 40 meg per hour with runtime compression. that was back in 94. The theory is simple enough, 1 volt peak to peak video signals are fed into a diode decoder on the serial port. white on the video means a one in the serial. VBS used 4 data columns with the last being for error correction and the top and bottom of the video had syncronize info. it worked very well, i remember backing up about 4 gig or more this way. the amiga had NTSC composite out on all of the older systems, as pc's dont, there would have to be a standard.
Back in the early/mid 1980s[1], I got burned by one of these. It backed up a PDP-11/23 to a VHS VCR. Management[2] bought into this as our only backup for the 11/23s.
....
The first test I ran was simple:
1. Make a full backup
2. Delete a file
3. Restore the file from the backup
It didn't work. All it did was read through the entire tape and report "restore unsuccessful". No useful info. Bad tape? Maybe, but I tried with a couple of different tapes. My guess was that the software was only capable of handling "full partition" backup and restore, despite what the manual said. I assume (with no evidence) that *somebody* ran *some* tests before they bought into this.
To add insult to injury, they bought top- of- the- line VCRs, about US$1000 each at the time. The VCRs had been in- house for less than a week before they started disappearing[3]
[1] Yes, we had computers then.
[2] Pointy hair is timeless.
[3] I guess this was a self-solving problem, except that we had no working backup.
--
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
They are blocking my Mozilla browser because their detection routine is broken.
Idiots.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
...it affects the majority of /. readers who attempt to visit the second link mentioned in the article.
I thought (about a month or two ago) about this but didnt get much further than idle thinking, might make a cool little project.
this would be nice to ask which media-specific peripherals/technologies could be used for other purposes.
For example, as a former Amiga geek I used to dedicate my MIDI setup to networking tasks (it was quick enough to play)...
And now, as a musician, I was wondering if somebody would create some AGP sound board in order to benefit from an even wider data bandwith (imagine yourself simultaneously sampling 64 CD-quality channels)...
Of course, sysadmin could also dream of even faster AGP-based network adapters.
Finally, the most realistic bit : the ones who are deseperately looking for some fine random number generator could also look forward to sample ambiant noise with their sound board. In this case we are dealing with easy-to write software.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Funny. I think it's good how some people out there have a clue, and a sense of humour.
Better to stay silent, and let people think you're an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt
Hi,
Sorry Offtopic, but this deja vu thread reminded me of a tape based game called "Bedlam" for the COCO (coco2 in my case)... Does anyone have any info on this (or where I could find this tape/game/code?)
Maybe I should post this over in the abandoware topic/discussion =P
thanks!
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
soo.... you think it is possible to do this with a VCR or other cheap-ass and common tape device in high-quality mode or such?
.wavs and look at .wavs encoded as images.
.pdf or other binary file, then carnivore wouldn't recognize it as text and wouldn't be able to scan or analyze it as such? (yeah yeah i read all about carnivore, but i forget how it looks at the packets)
or possibly replacing the heads of the VCR with something else that works better?
also, i was just wondering if anybody has heard of a linux util. that lets you encapsulate a file inside of another file format? i know that people have used gifs and such to send coded messages in the past. there would be a variety of cool things you could do with a program like that, such as uploading to a digital camcorder or other digital device with a supported file type, you could listen to images changed to
this also might be a good way to avoid detection of stuff by carnivore, that is, if you encapsulate a text file in
C:\>ls
bad command or file name
C:\>uptime
Well, the obvious solution is to write something that will convert tar files to aiffs (or pick your own favorite non-lossy format). This way, you can also *listen* to your data, just like Ellie Arroway in contact. It's like loading programs from casette all over again! And with ADAT, you could back up and restore up to 8 tracks simultaneously!
Tweet, tweet.
A friend of mine had an Amiga of some sort awhile back, tricked out and customized into some sort of Thing. He had a card in it that was equipped with either an SVHS or RCA out. I asked him what it was for and he wagged his finger at a stack of video tapes on the shelf. "Backup," he told me. It turns out he had a VHS deck patched into his Amiga, and regularly backed the contents of his drive to the deck, popping in eight hour tapes and letting it run while he slept.
So it CAN be done, with older hardware- but would anyone really have the patience in this day and age?
This is old news, in a sense.
Old Exabyte 8mm drives were able to accept an $8 handicam tape instead of a $40 Exabyte tape.
*yawn*
I have become, comfortably numb
120 meter DAT-II tapes cost less than $10. Why bother with lower-quality media.
As noted by several others in this thread...
the above post is way, way off topic - talking about browser standards in a thread about backing up to DV tapes. how did it ever get modded to +4?!
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
------------------------
In addition to archiving the video on the drives to the tape as regular video, it encodes your timeline, edit bins, preferences etc. as data in the video area of the digital signal. It ends up looking like snow - random white blocks signifying data bits. Only with digital betacam, since it's lossless and noiseless, it can be done at a much higher data rate than using, say, VHS, without tape noise and much less fear of degredation or tape hits. (as long as the heads on the deck are clean)
I think this is probably the most advanced example to date of backing up data inside of a video signal. (in this case the video signal is all digital and uncompressed from end-to-end, so it's really just a data stream...but still, you can watch it on a monitor!)
Before you run out and get a deck and an D1 encoder...the deck costs $40,000 alone! :)
--Mike
Mike Massee
Little do they know. the Noname will "clock" speeds of up to 400mhz on a good day. That's on a 133. Antiques? Still way ahead of their time.
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
If your looking at price than according to my calculations tape is nowhere near as cheap as many other backup storage.
Take CDR's. I get my CDR's (high quality compusa brand, WOOHOO!) for $0.20 a disk. That means that for a dollar you can get 3,250 megs of storage and for ten dollars you can buy 50 disks equaling 32,500 of storage!
The definate downside of this option is having to burn 50 disks of data, but it is cheap.
Click here to read too much about my personal life
DDS-4 tapes cost about $20 if you buy them in reasonable quantity. This holds 24 gigabytes native (up to 50 gigabytes compressed). This works out to being a couple bucks less expensive per 10 gigabytes as compared to consumer tapes.
The DDS-4 drive is a bit expensive, but if you want a cheap drive (but more expensive tapes), buy one of the OnStream IDE tape drives (which sell for under $200 thru most discounters, and store 15gb native on a $35 tape). I haven't particularly been impressed by the Onstreams (to me they're the latest incarnation of the late unlamented TR-x technology), but they are still far more reliable than any consumer A/V tape and/or drive.
Exabyte once tried to make an 8mm tape drive that used 8mm camcorder mechanisms and tapes. It was horrendously unreliable, and forever soured many people on Exabyte and on 8mm tape backup in general. Exabyte learned their lesson -- their follow-on (the Mammoth series) and its tapes were engineered from scratch to be digital computer backup devices. It's sad that too few remember such lessons and would be willing to entrust their data again to A/V quality tapes and drives.
-Eric
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I don't mean to be petty, and I don't usually complain about the minor errors that slip by on /. but...
The use of the logo of a company once known as the Digital Equipment Corporation for an article that discusses IEEE 1394 video cameras for data backup seems like a glaring lack of knowledge about the computer industry before 1998. (DEC was bought by Compaq in 1998)
While I wouldn't suggest striking the trademark Digital logo from the library as it may be appropriate for some articles on legacy systems, care should be taken that it isn't mistaken as a generic image for anything "digital" - in the opposite of analog sense.
--Aaron Greenberg
Funny... I didn't get a message like that. Of course, that might be because I use Opera, which fails at a lot of other things, simply because it IS standards compliant...
NT
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
There is one way you could do this, however, which is if you didn't use the rename zip -> avi step and instead focused on tricking the camera into accepting data instead of pre-compressed video. IIRC, most DV camcorders essentially don't check their input for validity as a DV-format video. In this case, you just need to be able to do a direct stream copy of data into the camera's IEEE-1394 port, preferably with some error correction, which is what the whole article is about.
This is probably just as easy to do in Windows as in Linux, in that both (currently) lack usable programs to do this.
You can even do this sort of thing with RAID but it in not very pratical because to get a big error recover versous redundacy overhead gain you need many bits (like say 24) and they have to be all seprate disk since these days the number one cause of error on harddrives (not fixed by the harddrive itself.) is diskcrash....
Grey (Chris Lusena)
I have a 8mm SCSI tape drive and can interchange the tapes with my camcorder. Each tape can hold around 14GB after compression. They are no longer in production (as everything has gone to 4mm or less), but you may be able to find them easy in surplus.
If your sig was meant to be ironic, then good job.
If not, then it's still damn funny.<BR><BR>
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
The problem here is that the error patterns for certain media are "bursty". Meaning that while the overall error rate is 1 in 1,000,000, you are likely to have many bit errors in close proximity to each other in practice. I believe that this is the case with magnetic media such as magnetic tape.
My other first post is car post.
First, this anti-Microsoft stuff gets really old. Using it as a basis for your argument simply makes you look like a biased ignoramus (and I don't mean this in a flamatory way mods).
/designs/ going for thousands and thousands of dollars these days, full site development is a small fortune for a professional, business-like site (Amazon.com without the crashes, for example.) The last company I worked for gave me stock rather than the full monetary value, they just couldn't afford it (and I'm relatively cheap by today's standards.)
As a web developer, I know the chores of making the code work for as many browsers as possible. Whether you like it or not, IE is the most used browser - I highly doubt Grandpa Jackson is going to install Mozilla on his brand new Compaq. He just wants e-mail, maybe a little nudies (if he's like my grandfather) and some news. The majority of computer users these days are not technophile gurus; they're the computer illiterate users of prehash Compaqs and Gateways. As such, IE is MOST used in this demographic because it is the general standard. I have to develop for this standard, because companies want as far reaching material they can get. Most don't care that you're using some browser that they've never heard of; their reasoning is 'get something that works.' I have to agree. I have been happily using Mozilla in Linux and IE in Windows for quite some time.
In addition to that, most companies DO NOT have the resources to develop for multiple platforms. With just
Also, that link said that I was not standard when I loaded it up in IE, yet when I opened the BrowserList, it had Internet Explorer listed. Right...
Lastly, I highly doubt blind people are going to be visiting the majority of the web. I don't think they'll visit Ford's site to find out the latest on the new series of vehicle. I don't know any blind people that are hardcore Quake or Unreal Tournament gamers. And they most definitely do not visit Don't Post Porn Here.. I imagine that a blind man would rather have his hands on a pair of breasts than hear the text talking about them.
Orange Micro made an S100 bus card that allowed backup to video cassette. (VHS or Beta)
Back before networks were widespread, we wanted to use them as video modems.
One of the tape manufacturers put up info on a tape drive that could record either data or video onto miniDV. But the product never actually materialized.
I think the key tech piece that the drive had going for it, was that it could play back data at differing speeds, depending on what was needed. (To facilitate different mpeg encoding rates.
I really wanted to buy one, but it never happened.
Sony released a DVCAM tape drive with some of the earlier DVCAM products they made. I assumed it was designed to be used for backup, although I can't find any trace of it on the sony website, so it mustn't have been profitable. But why would you use tape anyway? the cheapest and easiest way to backup is just to buy another IDE hard drive.
F4+80y +1++135
FatBoy Titties - (aren't I l33+
Saw something like this a year or two ago in a magazine. Think it was PC World or something. Basically it was a little kit that hooked your computer to your VCR and let you do backups to VHS tapes. Looked pretty cheesy. Think it was about $40 or so.
Is it viable to backup data on audio tapes using sound card ?
It was great when 20 Mb was a lot of data, but now, it's rather obsolete.
Alpha Micro is one of those orphan companies that just keeps going, and going, and going. They started life in 1976 with a 16 bit bit-slice CPU running on a modified S-100 (i.e. Altair) bus (these mods later became the IEEE 696 16-bit S-100 bus standard, IIRC). Came with an assembler, bytecode-compiled BASIC, and a multi-tasking, multi-user O/S (AMOS).
Yes, that was in 1976 -- pre IBM PC, pre Apple, pre CP/M, and espescially pre-Microsoft.
Sadly, the world went a different way (CP/M, DOS, Windows, and Unix (which was already around)), than did Alpha Micro. Still, they manage to stick around.
I had written LOTS of assembler code for that machine, including the SPY program, which allowed one terminal to shadow another one, even if they ran at different baud rates and used different screen control codes.
Ah, the memories.
You could've hired me.
Maybe it's something to do with the proxy here - but I'm not taking back the "scum" insult!