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:Offsite.

[MightyYar]

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.

Re:Offsite.

[Archfeld]

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.

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.

Ashes to Ashes ...

[powerlord]

... 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?

Are They?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they are naked vids of you and your GF, the Internet will gladly archive millions of copies.

Re:Wow

[Ravaldy]

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

Re:Wow

[redmid17]

Literally punching in what I suggested into Google yields this Slashdot discussion as the 2nd result

http://ask-beta.slashdot.org/s...

Whodathunkit?

But what about asteroids?

[ArcadeMan]

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

Re:Wow

[Art Challenor]

Whodathunkit?

A link to Slashdot Beta the new goatse.cx?

Re:Back up to optical media

[C0L0PH0N]

I second this approach. Keep a "master archive" of highest quality, both on local hard drives and backed up to the cloud (BackBlaze for example has unlimited backup for $5/mo). Then provide "exhibit" copies at a lower quality to the web and to friends. Backing up the "master archive" is critical! The "derivative" files shared out aren't so critical, as they can be reconstructed from the "master archive". An example is MPEG-2 will preserve videos at high quality, but with large file sizes. Scanning slides to TIF at say 4800 dpi will create 20mb files. These are "master archive" material. But you can prepare a copy of the video as an MPEG-4 or H.264 at much lower quality and much lower file size, that will still look stunning over the web. And you can derive JPGs from the master TIFs that at much lower quality, still look stunning over the Internet, for example. But for posterity, the "master archive" can become a museum collection for your descendants that they will cherish. An interesting thing to ponder is, will the US ever get hit with a few EMP nuclear bursts? If so, they may wipe out all magnetic media everywhere. That is where backups on optical disks, say, Blu-Ray, would be valuable. May be being a little paranoid there? :). For more information on this approach, consult http://archivehistory.jeksite.....

Safe deposit box

[wiredog]

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.

Re:Safe deposit box

[safetyinnumbers]

You should consider creating par2 parity files, which can repair as well as detect corrupt files.

Re:Ask Slashdot

[Anne Thwacks]

Of course its rejected. Bacon is the only way! (Sausage is for Emacs users).

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).

 

Burn to M-Disc

[guytoronto]

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.

Yes, Voyager

[SuperKendall]

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.