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General discussion

Camcorder home movie back up

Mar 23, 2011 1:59AM PDT

I recently purchased a Sony Blu ray burner to transfer my home movies from my Sony camcorder's hard drive.

I am a bit leery of having the only copy of the movie on DVD should something happen to the DVD.

What would anyone recommend for a second copy to keep as a back up? The hard drive on my camera holds 32G but I usually transfer at 20 or so so it will fit on the blank Blu ray DVD.
A large flash drive?
Thanks

Discussion is locked

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My opinion only...
Mar 23, 2011 7:27AM PDT

Options:

1) Burn a second Blu Ray disc identical to the first. Store the other disc somewhere else - preferably in another building... state... Setting up a directory system and numbering plan to keep track of what is on which disc would be beneficial.

2) Flash memory is volatile and not suitable for long-term archiving (there is difference between "back up" and "archive"). A RAID1-capable Network Attached Storage (NAS) system with hot-swappable hard drives will have at least two hard disc drives with identical files. You copy only once; the RAID1 optionality copies to the other "mate" drive. Hard disc drives can be in the multi-Terabyte range. When the drive(s) fill(s), replace them with new drives. One drive stays with you, the other is sent/stored elsewhere. Sans Digital, Buffalo, D-Link, LG, NetGear and many others make suitable systems.

3) Get a digital tape deck (expensive) or HDV camcorder and use digital tape as the archive storage media. This means your computer needs to have a firewire port to connect to the digital tape deck (or miniDV tape HDV camcorder). The video would not be AVCHD compressed MTS files as you have today... basically, import the high definition video to a computer's video editor to decompress the video, then export to the miniDV tape as low-compression HDV format video. The digital tape becomes the "archive" and stored off-site.

There's at least one more, but it is computer network based and relies on commercial-grade DAT (or other digital tape - not miniDV) data systems back-up server implementations using a tape-media carousel that would normally be maintained by a network administrator.

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Thanks
Mar 24, 2011 12:41AM PDT

I appreciate the info. Sounds like just making 2 DVD's makes the most sense.