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?

Comments

Offsite.

[Kaenneth]

Keep a copy in a different building to protect against fire/flood/theft/etc.

Re:Final Cut Pro library

[jedidiah]

In other words: throw lots of money at the problem regardless of whether or not the solution is even vaguely appropriate.

Back up to optical media

[Anonymous Coward]

I archive my home movies in three ways:

1. Keep highest quality copy on my always-spinning hard drive
2. Keep highest quality copy on someone else's online storage, such as Mega.co.nz, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.
3. Make regular copies to DVDs (and starting this year, Blu-rays) and distribute to my family members for their own collection. They in turn do the same with theirs.

This way if anything were to happen to one copy, there's always other locations to get a copy of it.

raid is not backup

[Anonymous Coward]

You're going to hear this more than once, so I'll get it out of the way for my part: Raid is not a back up.

don't know how much space you're talking about but I have a local backup and then an offsite backup. If the whole city gets taken out, I'll lose my data but I have other problems that concern me more.

But what about asteroids?

[ArcadeMan]

Better to keep a backup on Earth and on Mars, just in case.

Re:Final Cut Pro library

[lgw]

For pro video editing - which is to say lots of content that frequently changes - tape backup still makes sense. There's still no better way to archive large amounts of data, although 2.5 TB (IIRC) tape size for the latest LTO has fallen behind, and the next gen isn't due for likely a year.

But the one-time cost for tape drives is pretty steep. If you're going to use many tapes each month, it's worth it. Heck, I'd say even at 10 TB of new data a month being archived, there's no better way. But for, say, 10 TB of fixed data that just needs to be archived once, it's overkill.

Buy a few HDDs, keep their shipping containers, make a backup and ship them to a friend in a different state. Repeat yearly. That's the economical way. Eventually it will all fit on a single drive, after all (aren't there leading edge 10 TB drives already?), and so you're looking at ~$10/month long term (heck, no matter how much fixed data, eventually it will fit on one drive and cost about that much).