Large DV/Hi8 tape archive project.

[wertert]

I have seem a few threads on this subject but most of them end in the buy-large-drive conclusion.

I'm about to start out on 'project camcorder archive'. I have

45 DV tapes
30 Hi8/Video 8 tapes

I'm planning to firewire them over to my PC and then onto an external 'archive' drive which is will keep forever. I do not want to re compress to divx/mpeg2.

So how many things are wrong with this plan ?

1) I do not own a DV or a Hi8 Camcorder anymore.
2) Hard drives fail.
3) Tape degrade.
4) Do I really know how much data we are talking about.

Point 1) is solved by hiring the relevant kit. I have sourced a company who can provide an DV deck and an older Hi8 camcorder, both with firewire
Point 4) I think we are talking about just over 1TB of data. ( ie 75 * 14Gb = 1050 Gb )
Point 2) and 3) means that I cannot rely on the hard drives or tapes in 10/20 years time.

I've been thinking about some sort of DVD-R archive which I will also create. It would appear that a single DV file will not quite fit onto 3 DVD-Rs so we looking at 4 DVD-R per tape. That's alot of DVD-Rs ! and also DVD-R 4 will contain very little data. Something like 3.1 DVDs are actually required

I'm also slightly concerned about using DVD-R because I have seen problems in the past where I've completely filled a DVD-R only to find that
I see problems towards the end of the disk ( mostly video ). I'm considering only using 95% of the disk - perhaps less.

I would also like to use PAR files. These parity files are excellent for recovering data if parts of my archive become lost or damaged. I think this also implies
some sort of split multi volume archive so I would probably split of original .avi file into multiple .rar files. As disk 4 is hardly used we have space for PAR files.

So that's about as far as I've got so far. I already have lots of questions that are appearing.

1) Parity - should I distribute the parity files across all the DVD-R or leave them all on the last DVD-R ? I'm thinking in terms of covering the scenario where on of the DVD-R becomes unreadable.
2) .rar file size - what split size to use and how many .rar files ?
fs3) Use PAR1 or PAR2 ?
4) use FSRAID or winrar ( winrar has a similar feature to PAR files )

Just to expand on 1)

If I had 4 x DVD-R, each would hold 3 .rar files and 1 .par files

That means the DV .avi file would be broken up into 12 .rar files of 1.14Gb each. Each disk would also hold 1 x par file of 1.14Gb each. 4.56Gb per DVD ( too much ? ). If any one disk in the archive was unreadable I could recover the whole thing using the par files on the three surviving disks



should I just buy a blueray drive ...?

Any thoughts would be welcome.

[2Bdecided]

There are good discussion about this all over this board, and on the internet and usenet in general (try rec.video.desktop, for example), but here are my thoughts...

When you've made your initial copy, you'll then have two copies of the data: original tapes, HDD.

If you copy to another HDD, you'll then have three copies.

You can copy to DVD-Rs too, or wait a few years for recordable HD-DVDs or whatever. (As well as the space issues you note, if you're aiming for DVD-Rs, you have to split the files so they fit! HD-DVD etc will solve this nicely).

However, the consensus is that, historically, miniDV tapes have better longevity than HDD, are still cheaper per GB than DVD-R or HDD (they're 13GB=£1 each from Amazon!), but are going to slowly be replaced by other formats.


Whichever route you choose, count on transferring again in five years time (which means HDD convenience is a big plus point!). Leaving it ten years is probably too long, for various reasons. (Media expiry, compatible hardware unavailability - can apply to miniDV and HDD).


Let me say something weird. If there's one format which I would be more confident of still being able to play back in 5-20 years time, it's VHS. I wouldn't archive to it, but if I wanted to be really certain of being able to play it or transfer it in a decade, and professional formats (or film!) were out of my reach, that would be it. It's bulky, low quality, and obsolete, but there are millions of machines out there, someone is going to keep some of them working for decades yet, and catastrophic media failure is almost unheard of (whereas with HDD it's inevitable!).

Cheers,
David.

[wertert]

Hi and thanks for the fast reply. Just to clarify there would only be one copy on harddrive and one copy on dvd-R. I would still have the tapes but I have no way of playing DV tapes in the future. I would have to source a camera/deck to play them.