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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?"
Pictures: Backed up to HDD, DVD and Flickr. For $24.95, it's cheap offline backup and the grandparents love it.
Movies: Taken on MiniDV, backed up to HDD.
The only worry I have is that the MiniDV's and HDD are in the same house although they are stored in separate locations. But every picture is backed up offsite.
Only professional CDs have that sort of shelf life, because they're physically stamped. The consumer grade ones use a type of photosensitive dye that DOES decompose in less than a decade.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
No one's brought it up yet, so I will... As the price/convenience/long term compatibility and viability of storage goes down and down, I wonder to what end we will end up keeping this stuff? How many hours of video that you're paying (in time, money, security against fire/damage/loss, etc) to keep up you're actually going to watch? Sure, it's nice to have every single event in your child's life on demand at the touch of a button/click of a mouse, but aren't just plain old memories ok? Does his entire life have to be recorded and watchable?
At some point, I came to the realization that I had downloaded over 6 solid months worth of music. This doesn't include CD's, LP's, or 7 inch records, of which I probably have 1000 total. If I were able to put all that music on a big loop, and not repeat anything, I'm thinking it would last over 12 months. Some of these I'll probably never listen to. I'm thinking the same is true for the submitter's videos.
My parents have a big box of photographs from their childhoods, as well as those of their parents. There are some great photos in that box, and I could and have spent hours going through them. Each time I do, I make a mental note that one day I'll scan them and make them digital. Then I realize that we only drag out that box once or twice a year, and never do anything with the photos anyway, and resign to scan them once it gets even cheaper.
I suspect that in a few decades, estate planning will include what to do with the family terabytes.
True that. I have CD's I burned in 97/98. I pulled 'em out recently to cull the data and put it onto a DVD only to find that it was garbage. The disc couldn't even be read. There are some that are better than others. If you google for archive quality media you'll find countless discussions on it.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm amazed that no one mentioned it. Just get 16gb usb flash disks.
It has theoretically unlimited life for archiving. The only time it deteriorate is when you continuously write/erase it.
I already have instructions on how to access my archives, what is available to whom, and what to destroy as part of my will.
Fnord.
You're not thinking in a sufficiently long term. Yes, my wife and I only watch videos of our kids when they were babies a couple times a year. Our kids are 4 and 5 now, and they love seeing themselves as babies, that's one of the best parts of the experience.
*But* - the real value of those videos will come much farther on. My wife enjoys seeing what I looked like as a baby and a young kid, and I enjoy seeing what she was like then, too. Our kids' future spouses may enjoy seeing their baby videos, but even that isn't a long enough term
The real value of those videos will come long after the OP is dead and gone. For example, my mom's dad died relatively young (his early 50s), before my parents even knew each other. He was an extremely skilled hunter and fisherman, and I marvel at the stringers of fish I see in pictures of him with his friends, for both the size and the quantity of the fish. He hunted all sorts of birds, raccoons, just about anything but deer. My mom says he wouldn't hunt deer because too many deer hunters would shoot at anything that moved in the bush without even seeing what it was. But he shot enough raccoons that my mom and my grandmother both had raccoon coats (a fashion at the time, but theirs were all made from coons my grandfather shot with his side by side 12-gauge).
I'm the only one in my family who fishes. I taught myself. I would have loved to have learned to hunt, too, and I'm sure I would have learned from my grandfather if he'd lived longer. I love all those old pictures of him. Sadly, my mom sold his old fishing gear, and shotgun, and marbles (what a collection! Like I've never seen before or since) when I was too young to even realize that I could/should object and say "Hey, keep that stuff! I want it!" It all went to an antique dealer. A bamboo baitcasting rod. Original Creek Chub Bait Company lures from the 1920s and 1930s, most still with their original boxes. His Pikie Minnow was in near-new condition, I remember.
So (everyone) by all means, preserve those family videos on a number of media. Hard drive. DVD. Blu-Ray. Whatever comes after Blu-Ray. DLT (been around a long time, and will be for a long time to come), flash drive, etc. If possible, pass down to your children not only the media, but devices capable of reading them.
In the even longer term, like hundreds of years from now, if a lot of video from the present day is preserved, the archeologists of the future will have a much easier time seeing what our times were like than archeologists today have of seeing what times just a few hundred years gone were like.
And yes, that means I think humans will be around for a long time to come. We're the most successful species in the history of the planet and we're not going away. I'll even make a bold prediction: 20 years from now, the air and water will both be cleaner than they are today. If anyone doubts this, let me tell you that I grew up in southern California in the 1970s, and despite the fact that California's pupulation has roughly doubled in that time, the number of cars on the roads has more than doubled, the air is better now than it was then. We've yet only scratched the surface of alternative fuel vehiclesf, and emissions of internal combustion engines can still be improved. 20 years from now, vehicles that use only an internal combustion engine for power will be in the minority. They might even be downright rare. And the air then will be as much better than the air now as the air now is better than the air in the 1970s in LA.
Don't know if I'll be around to see it, since I'm almost 50, but it's the world I want to leave for my kids. Along with their baby videos :)
That's not quite good enough. When I wanted to back up drafts of my master's thesis, this is what I did.
1.) Assign each revision (or tape, in your case) a unique word combination of bizarre sexual acts. For instance "Ostrich feces smeared by Horny Redhead Orangutan Schoolgirls."
2.) Keep the list of mappings of backed-up files to unique names very, very safe. Keep the list, written down is fine, in a safe deposit box at one or more locations.
3.) Upload the "porn videos" to Usenet, Kazaa, Gnutella, etc.
I think you'll find this backup method more than sufficient to withstand fire, flood, meteors, and other acts of God. It sure saved my butt several times when I needed to find old versions of my thesis to build on in future work. If you want to see the final draft of my thesis, just search for "Crazy teen Lllama Sucking Blonde Elephant". There's about a million copies out there, just rename to .pdf.
For extra points, is anyone out there willing to write automated software to perform such backups? I'm thinking, you have the user enter a few dozen unique animal names, sexual acts, etc. Then, everytime you do an SVN commit, the backup manager chooses a unique combination of words, renames to .avi, and uploads to the usual locations.
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