The Question of Ongoing Long-term Storage
April 19, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
Doing a bit of space cleaning on my laptop this evening. Mainly due to my recent addition of some videos with my Flip Ultra, I realized that I had not removed all of my videos I recorded during our recent trip to Disney World this past December. I’m sure it’s no surprise to everyone reading this, but man! video files take up a lot of space.
Image Source: www.sxc.hu
The question started coming to my mind though of the best place to store these large, original video files? Is it better to get an external hard drive to store all of these files on? I can tell you if that’s the solution, then I’m going to probably need to go ahead and start looking at a terabyte drive or more.
I then started wondering if maybe burning them to DVD would be better? Lots of available media in my house for that and fairly cheap. Also somewhat easier to organize and access them as needed, at lease for actual archive purposes.
Perhaps the better question to ask is what media for long term storage is going to be the best bet not so much months or a year from now, but more years from now. Which method is going to be the more easily managed type of storage years from now when storage solutions could look very different.
I’m not sure if it’s a valid thought or not, but my other potential storage location was to just upload everything to a video sharing site. Who knows what the long-term validity of an online site will be though.
Personally, I’d vote for burning data on Blu-Ray disks, and then wait to see what is the next media to be pushed at consumers. I think it’s cheaper to just transfer everything from one type of media to another, without risking with a hard-drive.
However, you didn’t mention tape. Apparently it’s still widely used by data-warehouse administrators, probably for its endurance. Have you considered that?
I have thought about tape drives before when I saw a cheap one on eBay and started bidding for it. Ended up losing the bid and never really revisiting the issue after that. Moving from media to media seems like a logical idea, would e annoying if you had to do do entire archives spanning multiple discs more than a couple of times.