Best Way to Back Up Photos and Video?

jsalbre writes "I do a lot of digital video work, and my wife is a professional photographer. With raw DV from the video camera using up 11GB/hr, and raw images from the digital SLR using 7MB I'm quickly using up a lot of space. I currently back up all my important files each night from one harddrive to another, but I now have over 200GB of irreplaceable data (more than just DV and photos, but those make up the largest chunk) and I'm having to exclude the "less important" irreplaceable files as my backups have started failing. Several people have suggested backing up vital unchanging files to DVD (video, images,) and continue backing up frequently accessed files to harddrive, but with recent studies showing that optical media doesn't last very long I don't want to come back in a few years and find that all my backups are useless. Not to mention that some of my DV files are larger than even a dual-layer DVD, and it would be near impossible to automate backup to DVD. How do other Slashdotters back up their important data? I'd appreciate distinction between methods for frequently accessed files and for infrequently accessed files. Any suggestions will be highly appreciated!"

Comments

this is actually a BIG question

[Ralph Spoilsport]

And one that I have railed about for many years.

I have been in the same position the Author discussed, and I have come to ONLY negative conclusions. In a few words, and I hate to say this, but buddy:

WE'RE FUCKED.

Digital is a loser's proposition. backing up to analogue or even digital data on analogic substrates (such as DV tape) fail. Simply nad purely.

The *only* thing that comes close is some kind of RAID, and those, even with the plummeting price of storage, are still too expensive given the needs.

Also, a RAID assumes a continuity of several things that are not likely to be continuous:

With Video:
Framerate, number of lines, colour depth, aspect ratio, file format, compression format, Operating system compatibility, etc etc etc. All of these things are variables.

With Audio:
sample rate, compression format, bit depth, file format, etc.

Basically all of it points to very bad places.

I am fairly well convinced that our age will simply disappear. They will find our garbage, the few books not pressed on acidic paper, our paintings (fat lot of good the abstract stuff will mean to them) and drawings, that's about it. the rest will just be shiny little bits of crap in the landfill.

Since we will have used up all the dense energy forms, they will be appalled at the energy requirements just to get the few remaining museum piece devices to work. Archiving the 21st century will be impossible. To the 25th century, the 21st century will be seen as a dark age - not only for the holocaust of the die caused by the failure of the petroleum based economy, but from the simple fact that very little of the information formats we are totally geared into will survive, including this note on /.

His problem of saving personal video is just the tip ofthe iceberg. His problem is the problem of our very civilisation, writ small.

That's why I am abandoning video, and going back to painting. In 500 years, my painting CAN survive. the video simply won't.

RS

I'd mod you both down as alarmist and uninformed.

[Sycraft-fu]

Infomation now is much more perminant than it was in the past, and digital has improved this a great deal. The amount of information we generate these days is enormous, far more than ever before the digital age. Thus it's not supprising much of it gets destroyed. For that matter, most of it isn't worth saving anyhow.

Books are not such a perminant media as you might think. They wear out, and can be destoryed. A good example is the Mayan Codices. Records seem to indicate there were thousands, however Spanish priests burned them as "works of the devil" during the European conquest of the Americas. Today only 4 remain.

Digital data can be so perminant because it is so easily copied. Perminance of data does not come form trying to make a single, eternal copy, but from having many copies all over the world. Digital data can be copied for essentially zero cost very easily. Thus it's easy to give it a great deal of robustness. Also, as new formats come out, you simply copy and convert the data. I have data on my harddrive today that orignally existed on 5.25" floppy for the Apple II. It has simply been copied and converted a number of times.

Finally, it's not like book are going away. On the contrary we publish millions of works a year amounting to billions of books.

You seem to have a false sense of perminance, as though in the past things were archived forever. That's not the case, actually, most data was lost, that's one of teh reasons we have such an incomplete picutre of history. You don't even know all that was lost, because the record of it even existing, if there was one, is also lost. What has survived is by chance, or by effort, not because we had some wonderful archival system.

You don't have to have something on an immutable, indestructable medium for it to survive. The Nordic Legends weren't written down for centuries, yet today we still have them. They were passed down, as an oral traditon for generations. There was no perminance to them other than stories in people's minds, yet they've durvived thousands of years.