[HappyCamper]

I usually do a lot of editing of my home movies before I author them as DVD's. But before I edit them I usually encode the unedited movies as I-frame only mpeg2 program streams and burn them to high quality DVD-R's. I keep one of these at home and store another in a safe deposit box at my bank. This might seem a little extreme, but after a friend of mine lost his entire home movie collection in a fire, I decided to store these backups in a location other than my house. I had the safe deposit box for other things, so it seemed like a logical choice for me. All the insurance in the world can't replace the movies of my kids growing up.

I know there's probably someone out there that's going to say that DVD-R is not a good archival format, but the way I look at it is, the DVD format will be obsolete someday before too long...then you transfer them to something new. So it doesn't have to last all that long.