Best Way To Store Digital Video For 20 Years?

An anonymous reader writes "My kid is now 1 year old and I already have 100G of digital video (stored on DVDs, DVD quality) and photos. How should I store it so that it's still readable 10 to 20 years from now? Will DVDs stil be around, and readable, 10 years from now? Should I plan for technology changes every 5 to 10 years (DVD->Blue-ray->whatever)? Is optical storage better, or should I try to use hard drives (making technology changes automatic)? And, if the answer is optical, how do you store optical disks so that they last?"

Comments

Re:CDs are still readable

[Anonymous Coward]

no they're not. ever hear of cd rot?
store everything on hard drives, with duplicate backups stored off site.

Gold Disks

[stretchpuppy]

Claim up to 300 years.

http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Home_Office/Storage/U9P4F7L2

for some years: dvd + raid-1

[boldi]

Currently, There is no better way than store a backup on DVD and store the main data on a raid-1 disk set. Move the raid disk set to new disks every few years.

All the other technologies are more expensive, and even possibly more dangerous (loss of data due incompatibilies or for any other reason).

Storage array.

[palegray.net]

Build a simple storage array with RAID from a barbones PC, your favorite Linux distro, configured for fault-tolerant RAID. It doesn't have to be complicated, and it doesn't have to be powered on unless you're actually pushing data to it.

Every couple of years, you can add an extra couple of drives. With drive capacities increasing as fast as they are, cost shouldn't be a huge issue.

Use backups

[z00_miak]

Regardless of the methods you choose, I would highly recommend using at least two different media.

If these videos are important enough to be stored for 10 to 20 years, then they are important enough to be backed up - it is always difficult to foresee long term failures in any technology. If you read the article on tin whiskers they mentioned that some failures can not be tested using short time span methods.

NARA and Library of Congress

[Krieger]

Forget Wikipedia, ask the people who spend their lives trying to figure this out.

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/you/digitalmemories.html

http://www.archives.gov/preservation/technical/guidelines.html

http://www.archives.gov/preservation/family-archives/digitizing-photos.html

http://www.archives.gov/preservation/storage/

Re:HDDs

[DigitAl56K]

Do not buy the largest hard drives that you can find. Cutting-edge storage densities might mean bad long term reliability. Go for something a little smaller than the leading edge that has had enough test time for you to find a large number of reviews on the drive's reliability. These will also be cheaper so you can buy two and store them at separate locations.

When you store your files, write a small utility or script that runs through them all and builds redundancy data, like QuickPar, and that stores a hash, e.g. MD5, so that 20 years later you can check the data is still good bit for bit, and even if it contains errors theres a high probability that you'll be able to correct it, even from the redundancy data stored on the same drive, let alone your second copy.

One important thing: As well as all of this, on each drive store a copy of the software (e.g. codecs), as well as any registration information to make them work. Backups of your files are no good if you can't play them later. Try to avoid storing video long term in any format that requires a codec with online activation. Will that company still be around in 20 years time?

I have the opposite experience

[PerfectSmurf]

Your experience is very interesting because mine is the opposite. I make (at least) quarterly backups of my data and have since mid 1993 (CDs since 98, floppy before that). This spring I got bitten by the curisoity bug and started going through all my old backups looking for forgotten and interesting things. Every CD older than two years had at least one unrecovereable read error. Every CD older than five years, except for one, was completely unreadable. Between two and five years the number of read errors grew with many files being lost and several CDs being unusable. The 3-1/2 floppies were all 100% readable.

In that time period I've been through probably a dozen CD burners, both expensive varieties and cheap ones, and I've used at least as many brands of media. All the CDs have been kept stored in dark, dry, clean places. I tried reading the "unreadable" CDs on multiple computers and met some limited success accessing additional data. I didn't try any recovery software.

Fortunately for me I kept most of these backups out of habit and I didn't really care about much of the older ones outside of curiosity.

Re:CDs are still readable

[jason.sweet]

Any storage medium you choose will degrade over time. You should plan to transfer the data every few years. Choose a storage medium that is well-supported, cheap and relatively durable - DVD or CD for now. You should also pay attention to the format of the data. If you use a video format that is rare now, chances are you won't have a way to convert it to whatever new format you need in 5 years. When it's time to copy (probably 5 years for CD & DVD, to be safe), use the same guidelines to choose the new medium.

Re:CDs are still readable

[Mr2cents]

Ok, I just went looking for the handbook I got with my photography course, there's a paragraph about optical media: The CD's with a greenish look are guaranteed up to survive for 1-3 years. The siverish CD's last about 10 years. And there are also more expensive CD's with a gold color, and a black protection layer on top, that last +/- 100 years.

It also mentions there is no durability data about DVD's yet. This seems strange to me, and it's maybe outdated.

It might be wise to get some advice at a photography store, I'm sure they get a lot of those questions.