how do you physically organise your backups?

[click2]

For the past ages i've had my great workflow to backup things i own. Reencode everything to 700M, ASP or whatever i felt like at the time, burn to CD, file alphabetically in a box (in a different room to the original tapes and DVD's).

But CD's arn't really cost effective now. DVD's are cheaper per gig and they're in the same ball park as harddrives. I still have hundreds of perfectly organised backups, though, and for now my encodes have been clogging up my harddrive because i don't want to burn things off any more.. it'd be a huge hassle to migrate everything to a NAS, and it'd be worse to have two separate stores.

How do you guys store your backups? Have you ever migrated backup styles, organisation etc?..

[Toti]

My way is simple.....

No physicall media. Windows Media Center for everything (Except some games).

Movies = wmv
Music = mp3
Pictures = jpg
TV shows = wtv (keep it original recorded)
Camcorder footage = wmv

I know it has its advantages, no media ,everything tagged and works great on media center but drawback is lossy compression, not a standard and not future proof.:)

[Sagekilla]

I don't see how it's not "future proof" if it lives on your computer. We have horrendous MPEG-1 and older streams from over a decade ago that still decode perfectly fine. Personally, I can decode those old streams perfectly fine on my vista machine no issues.

Hint: It doesn't matter if your movies are on the original DVD, a backup DVD, or on your computer. Each one is identically future proof. They all use some compression scheme, only difference being that your backup copies probably use a newer one like H.264.

[alemoine85]

Uhh I burn mine to DVD's...I use up quite a few but better safe than sorry imho :)

[JeepinDan]

I can remember when 8-tracks were quite popular. 5.25 inch floppy discs. I have nothing that will read them.

Don't count on being able to read/play your media in the future unless you actively manage it.

[madhatt3r]

I like to keep my stuff native to the operating system (Windows in my case)

Movies/Tele (DVD) = Windows Media VC-1 Main
(Blu-Ray) = Windows Media VC-1 Advanced

Music = Mp3 (lame 3.97; 320kbps)

Photos = jpeg

All running from my local serv (networked to computers and streamed to tv)

[DJ Bobo]

Back in the days where DVD burners were not available or very expensive, I burned everything to CDs. When the prices for burners and DVDs dropped, I moved everything to DVD, unless it's a VCD or is small enough that it doesn't need moving to DVD.
Everything is kept in a 250-disc album. I try to keep everything in alphabetic order, but it doesn't always work :D
In the near future, may be in 3 years, when blu-ray burners and discs becomes cheap, I think I'll move everything to blu-ray.
NAS is no option for me: too expensive, fragile, bulky.

WMV is a big no no by the way. I would never backup something in that crappy proprietary format. Most of my stuff is in DivX ASP format, with AVC taking over slowly.

[mr soft]

Back in the days where DVD burners were not available or very expensive, I burned everything to CDs. When the prices for burners and DVDs dropped, I moved everything to DVD

Aw they were the days , bags of cd´s in the bin, with the mini-disks. :D

How do you guys store your backups

Depends how much Data you have.

2 Tera Pcie SSD´s
http://www.engadget.com/tag/SSD

When the SSD race is over and prices crash, These will be perfect.

Hard drive storage is by far the most convenient.

I´m going to start to look into raid , as I´m always forgetting if I´ve backed up this or that archive to the external. :o

[pc_speak]

Operating Systems et al. (2 PCs + 1 laptop)
Incremental - Daily (to USB WD Passports. We have 1 on each PC)
Full - Weekly (at the moment 1 Maxtor 1Tb)
Offsite - Monthly (CD/DVD - Goes back 10 years. It's a Tax Office thingy)

Videos - CD/DVD/whatever
Burn 1 copy. Hold the input on a HDD for, maybe, 2 months.
Else I don't bother. Original AND copy get trashed, I buy it again.
If I can buy a John Wayne movie 55 years after it was made, on DVD, then I'm not worried. Audio is different.

Audio
This is important. I have the originals. Dozens of 45s, 33s, a few 78s (which I cannot play),
S***loads of tapes and approx 500 CDs.

Scratches, pops & squeaks everywhere. :)

I got, about 5 years too late, into doing some sort of electronic backup.
A lot of the tapes gave me a lot of trouble (remember the 5 years?). I lost a large number of tracks. I always have 2 current copies of all our audio at all times, in MP3. 1 for the boss & 1 for me.
One is in insane encoding. One fast quality, to listen to. I can't really pick the difference in the car or on 2 channel stereo. Don't get me started on the number of audio backups.

;)

[masken]

I store all my backups on DVD/CD's, in IKEA's MALM (http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/10120592). The discs are stored in double-sided ProSleeves (http://www.caselogic.com/500_disc_capacity_double_sided_cd_prosleeves/product_detail/index.cfm?modelid=86260). I've attached 4 simple divider boards into each drawer, so that it holds 5 columns of discs. This means that each drawer holds exactly 1000 discs perfectly :)

This is a very cost-effective storage solution. The Malm is available in different sizes, but the one I use has 3 drawers and costs ~€70. A 500-disc pack of ProSleeves is about €40. That's 10 eurocents per disc in total (plus the disc itself of course).

On the software side I use WhereIsIt (http://www.whereisit-soft.com/). I just put an incremental disc number on the physical media, and then categorize it in WII (I store ALL backups this way; system backups, photos, original DVD's, DVD-backups etc). Simple and effective :)

[NerdWithNoLife]

I'm leaning towards two hard drives with duplicate information. I've got way too much stuff for DVD's. I used to split TS files into DVD sized chunks with HJSplit and back them up to DVD. It was a huge pain calculating the exact amount and spreading the same episode onto multiple discs. Now I have a 1TB drive. Drag and drop. Hard drives make me a little nervous; hopefully solid state will fix that, but I'm considering another 1TB or larger drive to be used biweekly or monthly. I guess the less it is used, the longer it should last. And hopefully ten years from now there will be an affordable 100 exabyte drive!