archive to dv tape

This is an issue for many of us. We have around 30TB of hard drives at the office at this point, all backed up 1:1 (so 60TB total). But hard drives are NOT archival. They break rather easily and there's little data for long term storage. A clever little company out there could probably make a mint finding a solution to this problem.
 
as i understand LTO tape is the industry-recognized technology for those afraid of using drives.

but i have to ask. how many here really NEED this level of archival? in 20 years of shooting just about every kind of video shy of features. ive had fewer than say half a dozen situations where a client came back and needed access to their footage after say 18-24 months.

They break rather easily
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what are you people doing with your drives??!?!? ive kept one or more drives either in my audio bag or camera case for about the last 3-4 years and never had one "break"
 
This is where film still has it all beat. Archival options for up to a 100 years and beyond.... All of the options have issues in one way or another. It's kind of a crap shoot and I would say that if it's important to do everything... DVD with the non organic dyes, harddrives that you boot up once a year, and LTO, etc... Storing stuff on an online server might also be an option...
 
Making multiple copies of your data files to various formats makes sense. Hard drives. DVD. Tape. Yet, I have a drawer full of bad hard drives due to many causes. Bad power supplies, power failures, cables shorting, normal wear and tear, etc. Some DVD's I burned several years ago on reliable media are unreadable. The more copies you have, the better. Also migrate them to newer media once in a while.

Or hook your GH1 or computer to this and print to film ( not cheap! ) :

http://www.definity35mm.com/definity/specifications
 
sirf73 said:
about Amazon S3: you should expect 150USD/1TB/month. Btw.. how fast is your upload? ;) But in future, it will be very usefull and interesting service.
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Amazon has a service were you can mail them a HD, but its still not cost effective vs other meda.
 
wgzn said:
as i understand LTO tape is the industry-recognized technology for those afraid of using drives.

but i have to ask. how many here really NEED this level of archival? in 20 years of shooting just about every kind of video shy of features. ive had fewer than say half a dozen situations where a client came back and needed access to their footage after say 18-24 months.


what are you people doing with your drives??!?!? ive kept one or more drives either in my audio bag or camera case for about the last 3-4 years and never had one "break"
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We have lots of long term clients who indeed come back after many years needing access to their footage.
 
Store well to start with pehaps that is why my tapes back to 1979 are good,also my DVDs are well stored but some have lost data since 1990.

forgot to say i will never use cheap blank blu recordable discs again after 8 lost everything after 3 years.Luckily they were only ones with less important things on.
 
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We have lots of long term clients who indeed come back after many years needing access to their footage.
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i do hope you charge them for that or at least build it into the original price... and i think an LTO tape drive would be superb for your needs.

i guess my point here is that personally, im in the business of creating video. not data archival. not to say that im reckless with client data by any means : )
my practice is generally to duplicate a drive (at least once) upon completion of a project.
that drive either goes on a shelf or to the client if they want it. sometimes both. and aside from attaching and spinning the drive up a time or three a year, that's as far as it goes.

and again, in 20 years ive had zero cases of data loss attributable to drive failure
 
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Yet, I have a drawer full of bad hard drives due to many causes. Bad power supplies, power failures, cables shorting,
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im starting to wonder if many of the situations people perceive as "drive failure" are really just situations of a lack of understanding of whats actually going on in the shiny humming box...

none of the problems mentioned above has any direct connection to actual data loss. from my experience, many people who think they have a bad drive, simply have a bad enclosure.

i HAVE had about 5 different enclosures go bad over the years (typically from dead power supplies) and in that kind of situation, its really just a very simple matter of a half-dozen or so screws, unplugging a couple cables and the actual drive mechanism can be put into another enclosure or a dock or even one of those multi-cables. then youre back up and running in a matter of minutes
 
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I imagine when they scan 35mm film ....those files for commercial release , which are huge , are archived to harddrives. Archivers say periodically run the drives . The solution is redundancy . Also learning to trash what´s unnecessary helps with storage needs. If you want perfect storage shoot film . I don´t think it would hurt to have a hdv master of finished works, along with blueray and hardrive copies. Redundancy redundancy red......etcetc.
 
wgzn said:
im starting to wonder if many of the situations people perceive as "drive failure" are really just situations of a lack of understanding of whats actually going on in the shiny humming box...
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No, these are bare drives, not in enclosures. We've been doing computer maintenance + repairs since the 1980's. We have some drives 15 yrs old that still work. But other hard drives do crash, fail and burn out. The motors stop spinning, heads crash into the drive media. They can short out by hooking up cables incorrectly or frayed cables etc. If it doesn't spin or power up, it's dead. It may be possible to retrieve the data, but at a high cost. The drive media could be transferred to another mechanism.


-------

Larry Jordon Blogpost about Video Archiving on LTO:

http://www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/wordpress/archives/1392
 
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sirf73 said:
hdd is not good archiving solution (im servicing computers, so i know what im talking about)
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Well, me too. But I disagree that It's not a good archiving solution. I've been doing it for the past (at least) 10 years, no problems (of course you need to have backups of backups). But if you were talking about copying something and forgetting about it for 10-30 years, maybe HDD is not that great, but recompressing your stuff to a DV tape is even worse. Maybe a HP StorageWorks DAT (or similar) drive would be more useful?
 
Although I personally now archive on hard drives I agree that they are quite a "dodgy" medium for long term storage. Just remember that 100% of hard drives fail - it's just how long you get out of them before they fail that counts (and that goes for ALL manufacturers).

ALWAYS back up to at least 2 different HDDs perferrably of different brands as it is highly unlikely they will both fail at the same time. Also remember that NAS drives are only for data storage and NOT data backup. Avoid any optical media. Tape is good but somewhat impractical for HD footage. Flash memory has a definate "write" life so cards can become corrupted after a lot of use.
 
kurth said:
ok I researched the archival quality dvds´- the delkins apparently don´t work well on macs - the verbatims are cheaper and work great
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Thanks for the link. I prefer the Verbatim brand for DVDs. It doesn't look like they make archival blu-ray discs. I bought a Pioneer 12x Blu-ray burner for $140 a couple of months ago, and this is starting to become my favorite format for portable video storage.
 
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