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.

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: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).

 

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.