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?

2 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. In a word: No by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    A bad idea, because DV recorders do not perform error-correction or "forward confidence" on data written to them. This is a really bad idea and I wish people would get the hint once and for all.

  2. What kind of crack are you smoking? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Is it a practical alternative to your standard computer tape drives?

    Short answer: NO .

    Longer answer: I'm a film student, I've been working with MiniDV a lot the past few semesters. MiniDV, especially with the cheap ($5!) tapes, is very prone to dropping frames; you lose a frame on a good shot and it's an annoyance, but translate that into data backup and it could mean losing a piece of a file. How much do you value the data you're backing up? If you're bothering to back it up, you probably value it more than that.

    MiniDV has its flaws as a video format, so much so that Sony and Panasonic have come out with their own formats based on it to correct some of these problems (DVCAM and DVCPRO respectively). And that's what it was designed to do, and it still can't do it well. It wasn't designed for data storage. Use something that is.

    You can do something the cheap way, or you can do it the right way. People who value their data choose the latter for obvious reasons.

    --- I'm not a real anonymous coward, I just play one on TV.