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Preserving VHS Recordings For Another 20 Years?
efedora asks: "I have about 650 hours of VHS tape going back about 20 years (no, not my porn collection) and the tape is starting to deteriorate. What are the best options for preserving the contents? Quality is important but not critical, so long as it's close to the original. Very low labor cost/time and simple operation. are important. Is there an easy way to do this?"
"Some of the ideas I've had so far are:
- VHS to VHS tape with an analog 'clean up' box between the VHS machines. This would give me the same number of tapes but should last another 20 years. Quality will degrade.
- Burn DVD's direct from VHS tape. I have software that will do this. Expensive and the DVD's won't even hold a VHS tape if it's 2 hours long. Good quality with no degradation.
- Burn VCD's. I don't know of any simple direct-to-VCD software that will do this so there would be a large labor overhead. Good quality with some degradation. Cheap.
- VHS direct to cheap IDE drives. Good quality with no degradation. Relatively cheap. Probably could use the same technique as burn-to-dvd."
This is crazy but it'd work. Print every frame out one by one. This comes out to something like 70,200,000 pieces of paper, which as long as kept away from open flame, sunlight, moisture, wind, etc will essentially last forever. Plus the bragging rights for having a huge pile of paper is cool. (23,400 feet high to be exact given that paper is 0.004 inches thick, of course quality of paper will affect this.;-)
Oooh... Giant Flip-book!
Michael Loves Me!
Modern paper is too acidic, it will just eat itself up given enough time. I'd opt for inscribing it in tablets of lead, myself. That would sacrifice color, but you could make three tablets for every frame...
seriously, no matter what you do, it will eventually turn to dust...
the only way to keep data safe would be to constantly keep massive RAID-4+ disk drives constantly checking and correcting mistakes as the disks degrade over time. only through active monitoring of the integrity of the data could you correct errors before they appear. and then spread redundant copies of this all over the known universe so that no planetary activity interferes.
what am i smoking...
oh... right...
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
OTOH, my phono record collection dates back to 1949.
[lame humour attempt]
If you bought everything in your phono collection new maybe you should start worrying about preserving yourself for another 20 years instead of your music...
[/lame humour attempt]
Do you Gentoo!?
1. watch all of your porn... er, vhs collection
2. create an oral narrative that captures the heroic and essential nature of your vhs collection
3. create a religion based upon this oral narrative that centers upon wise men who have committed your narrative to memory from father to son for generations
4. enjoy your porn collection in the afterlife as a demigod
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is why true geeks store their porn collections by inducing resonances in quantum folds... guaranteed to survive the coming big crunch.
Set the whole lot on fire and forget about it.