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?"

Comments

I'd be nervous.

[Snowfox]

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.

VCR backup folklore

[Megane]

Here's a little story I heard about a VHS backup system. Seems a pawn shop had acquired one of these beasties, and decided to use it to back up their computer data.

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.