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Ask Slashdot: What To Do After Digitizing VHS Tapes?
An anonymous reader writes Now that I've spent close to a month digitizing a desk drawer's worth of VHS tapes, deinterlacing and postprocessing the originals to minimize years of tape decay, and compressing everything down to H.264, I've found myself with a hard drive full of loosely organized videos. They'll get picked up by my existing monthly backup, but I feel like I haven't gained much in the way of redundancy, as I thought I would. Instead of having tapes slowly degrade, I'm now open to losing entire movies at once, should both of my drives go bad. Does anyone maintain a library, and if so, what would they recommend? Is having them duplicated on two drives (one of which is spun down for all but one day of the month) a good-enough long term strategy? Should I look into additionally backing up to optical discs or flash drives, building out a better (RAIDed) backup machine, or even keeping the original tapes around despite them having been digitized?
... Tape to Tape
If you're looking purely at longevity of storage and reliability, Tape backup is still the way to go.
Baring that, spread backup copies around, and make sure to keep redundant copies on several flash drives?
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Definitely this. If you have a buddy or relative willing to have a little NAS box running on their network, you can do something like Crashplan and get offsite backup for "free". I happen to use Crashplan, but rsync would work just fine. Both let you "seed" the initial backup so that you aren't waiting for months to do the initial backup.
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Amazon Glacier is for long term storage of lots of data. While they only provide an API, it is easier to code to and 3rd party interfaces exist should you want a GUI.
It is also dirt cheap. My current bill is less than $1 per month. You'll pay more to access the data should you need to but storage is priced reasonably.
No backup media in use manufactured by ANY company is guaranteed for more than 12 months. While the media may have a 7 year life span the data on it NEEDS to be renewed at least once every 12 months and failure to do so abrogates nearly every warranty. I worked for a large bank and dealt extensively in federally mandated offsite Contingency Operations and Recovery and learned one thing, backups without recovery exercises are next to useless if you are actually seeking said protections rather than just meeting the bare minimum requirements set forth. If you really value the videos you've gone to such trouble to back-up then periodically you need to verify they still work and view them or you are just performing an exercise in rote time wasting.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Burn them to M-Disc. As long as there is a DVD player somewhere, no worries. M-Disc doesn't degrade like magnetic media or dye-based optical media.
You should consider creating par2 parity files, which can repair as well as detect corrupt files.