Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

MiniDVs as a Backup Medium?

Posted by Cliff on from the 15gb-for-$5USD-a-pop dept.

Matey-O asks: "Having purchased a MiniDV camcorder for the impending arrival of my twins (I suspect a majority of camcorder sales HAVE to be bought by new parents), I also purchased the firewire connection kit. Based on the software estimates on how much uncompressed video can be stored on the harddisk, it looks like a 60 minute MiniDV cassette holds about 15 Gb. Since the PC can control the camera, and the transfer is billed as lossless, has any work been done on using MiniDV as a backup medium? One Cassette looks like it'd store ALL of my important info, and at $5 per, it'd be pretty economical too." Reading this definition, it looks like the submitter may be mistaken about the 15GB size, and the Backfire pages at Sourceforge indicate a more realistic figure of 12GB. Backfire itself looks like it might be the project the Matey-O wants, but the last update is from April of 2000. Has anyone taken up this idea and tried this particular backup path, before? Is it a practical alternative to your standard computer tape drives?

7 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. dvdbackup by hairy+monster · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://dvbackup.sourceforge.net/

    1. Re: dvdbackup by Omniscient+Ferret · · Score: 3, Informative

      (checks page) Cool. There's an accompanying program that does error correction: rsbep takes up 14% with error-correction codes, but it can cope with 12240 consecutive bytes getting botched. So it can cope with (some) drop outs.

  2. Re:tape backup by Tom7 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm with you on this, but I don't see why you think error correction would take up a lot of the disk space. You usually don't need very much overhead (ie, more than the expected error rate on the tape) to get a good probability of being able to correct the data.

  3. MiniDV is not DAT by SIGBUS · · Score: 3, Informative

    DAT and DDS cartridges use 4 mm tape, while MiniDV is 6 mm.

    --
    Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
  4. Err, 80-minute MiniDV tapes? by FeatureBug · · Score: 3, Informative

    The submitter is right, I think. The data capacity for a 60-minute MiniDV tape is about 12GB. However, for 80-minute tapes, the nominal maximum data storage capacity is 80/60 * 12 = 15GB per tape, which might reduce after FEC overhead to 12GB per tape.

    --
    Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
  5. You beat me to it... by blackcoot · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://dvbackup.sourceforge.net/ FWIW, http://www.schirmacher.de/cgi-bin/dclinks.cgi?acti on=view_category&category=Linux+Software has whole bunch of DV software. While you're at it, you may want to check out Kino which appears to work great. For more fun software to use with your DV cam, check out Arne Schirmacher's pages. Good luck ;-)

  6. deja vu by jayrtfm · · Score: 2, Informative

    Looks like nothing has changed since this was previously asked.