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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?
Upload them to youtube! The internet never forgets, apparently.
Keep a copy in a different building to protect against fire/flood/theft/etc.
In other words: throw lots of money at the problem regardless of whether or not the solution is even vaguely appropriate.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
... 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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I archive my home movies in three ways:
This way if anything were to happen to one copy, there's always other locations to get a copy of it.
If they are naked vids of you and your GF, the Internet will gladly archive millions of copies.
Considering how many users on this forum will learn something from this I would say it's not a complete waste of time.
I spent countless hours searching the web. Unfortunately there is no straight answer but I do have one after trying many pieces of software. I'll post this in a different post
I had a similar problem as you and I found what I consider the best solution for home users. There are many options where you can store you data in the cloud for a yearly fee but it does get expensive as you pass the 200GB mark. What I use is Crashplan. Their software allows you to backup to their cloud or to a friends storage. So if you know someone else with the same problem you can have them allocate some space on their machine for you and you do the same for them. The backups are protected so he won't be able to play with your data. This is all at no charge.
I personally use the Enterprise version which allows you to host your own server. I have my reasons for doing this but most users will be happy with the free home version.
Literally punching in what I suggested into Google yields this Slashdot discussion as the 2nd result
http://ask-beta.slashdot.org/s...
Whodathunkit?
Better to keep a backup on Earth and on Mars, just in case.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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.
Whodathunkit?
A link to Slashdot Beta the new goatse.cx?
External hard drives are cheap. I Have one in the safe deposit box at the bank, one at home, and I rotate them every couple of months. I just do a copy of /Users (on my Mac, /home on Linux, not sure what the WIndows equivalent is) to the hard drive.
Best Slashdot Co
Of course its rejected. Bacon is the only way! (Sausage is for Emacs users).
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2 servers are set up raidz2 with 4 disks per server. So about 6-7 TiB of actual storage space.
The servers do dns, mysql, and smb via plugins and a jail.
the primary backs up to the secondary every evening.
All the TVs in the house are really xbmc clients connecting to the SMB shares and mysql.
The most expensive part of it is the 8ea 4T HDDs. ;).
Unless you have 10 people in your house watching different TVs at the same time, you can use real low end computers.
disks are $150 ($120 if you get externals on sale from huevonuevo & open the box). Excellent computer for this is a Dell poweredge T20 ($300).
These T20s have ECC RAM (you want this)
Anyhow 8*150 + 2*300 + a hundred bucks for misc. cables, bootable memory stick, maybe a switch...
Under 2 grand for the whole mess. Put one in your basement and one in your attic. Then you are protected from a flood or a tornado--but not both together.
If your house burns down, though, you're hosed
Upgrade plan is to "destroy" (that's the command...) the zpool in the secondary then change it from raidz2 with 4 disks to raidz2 with 6 disks.
let rsync do its thing, then swap the usb keys with the embedded OS.
Repeat with the old primary which will now be the secondary.
Already tried this once; works no problem. At any given moment I'm tolerant to at least 2 disk failures.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
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).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
They're both still vulnerable to supernovae. You should have at least one backup in another galaxy.
Fun fact, the real reason for the Voyager mission was someone wanted a permanent backup of William Shatner singing "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds". You didn't ever see the back of that record they included with Voyager, did you... now you know why.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nah, sell your homemade porn tapes in a tag sale. No need to digitize and restore them yourself. Someone else will get off doing that, post the results online, and soon they'll be replicated not just "in the cloud", but redundantly all over the world. It won't matter, you'll never know as you'll never desire to watch them anyway. You might earn a couple bucks at the tag sale though. Use it to buy vibrator batteries.