Ideas on Back Up of Video

T

Tin Man

Active member
OK, this topic probably comes and goes with many changes over the years, as tech changes.

But I need to ask.

Had a 500 G external HD go with about 450G of avi on it. Not really a big deal professionally, but it contained most of my master ISO collections and my avi's from several projects.

Don't even want to discuss sending this out for HD data recovery, been there already and cost is way too high. BTW, if anyone runs WD externals, change now, about 6 data recovery companies told me they are coming in large numbers.

I intend to back up most of my stuff on blueray disk for data storage. With blueray burners coming down, I think the large capacity will allow me to at least store the pure AVI on them. This will give me a more perminent source to draw from in years to come. I realize that 20g per hour of video is somewhat large to store, but i figure i can split each hour and catelogue them so i don't have to compress and keep in its purest form.


Any thoughts on the professional method vs. my idea, or should just store on tapes and forget about it, or online storage, which could be in the tyrabite range.


thanks in advance for all responses.

Tin Man
 
Hate to say it, but keeping all your critical data on one drive is not best practice, as you found out. You must duplicate for redundancy, so you can recover from disaster. Large hard drives are still more economical than Bluray, even when running mirrored, and much much faster. RAID 1 mirrors data on multiple hard drives, giving you automatic backups.
Speak to your local PC guru about external RAID boxes. You can get decent ones which hold 4 drives, so even mirrored you get 2TB of storage.
That said, Bluray is becoming cheaper by the day, so in a year or so it may compete price wise, but it never will speed wise.
 
How did it crash? In the olden days (when HDs failed regularly) we did a "brain transplant" by replacing the controller board with one from a working drive, and then copying the data. If it's a failed bearing (whining noise) you need to take the platters out and put in a new case, or head crash (grinding noise), then there's not much you can do.

Of course, this was a lot easier when drives were only 20 megs and the size of large books or VHS tapes...
 
thanks for the responses guys, and yes have a couple of 500 g drives now.

pmark23,

you read my mind, did all the background and looking for a match for the PCB board but HD recovery recommends finding same firmware board manufactured close to the date of old one. the other problem with 500g drives is it has 4 plattens, so switching out all 4 and aligning them in new 500 g drive is somewhat troublesome.

i am looking for both alternatives. but drive just seems like BS right now.
 
If you absolutely must get the data, then I would try the board transplant (should be quite easy to find a similar drive -- the rom versions are usually written on printed stickers stuck to the chips. Then try transferring the platters (though to be honest I don't know how feasible this is in this day and age. In my day a platter was the size of either an LP or a 45.)
 
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