How can we back up and store our archives of films for the long term?

Hi guys...I currenly have around 30 Damon Dark stories under my belt, some of them with a running time of around an hour! My PC's poor old C-Drive is pretty full...I have made DVD copies of some of them and some have been saved onto mini DV tape, too. But I am wondering if any of you can advise the rest of us...what is the best, most effective way to save and back up our archive of completed films and episodes so they will last into the future?

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated, as this is a key issue for me!
Ade

Hi Adrain,

One way, but its not cheap is to get a Drobo (google it). I use it to protect all my photography. At the moment its 2tb.

The other way is doing what your doing and put them on You Tube or google video. Minidv is good also.

Straker wrote:Hi guys...I currenly have around 30 Damon Dark stories under my belt, some of them with a running time of around an hour! My PC's poor old C-Drive is pretty full...I have made DVD copies of some of them and some have been saved onto mini DV tape, too. But I am wondering if any of you can advise the rest of us...what is the best, most effective way to save and back up our archive of completed films and episodes so they will last into the future?

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated, as this is a key issue for me!
Ade

Hi Ade.. I dont know what a Drobo is but I was going to suggest a 1 terabyte external hard drive.. I think you can get one for about $120. Only thing about hard drives are that they go bad without warning sometimes.. the SAFEST way I think you could do it is to burn everything to DVD. Maybe try ZIPPING up (compressing) as many episodes as you can get into about a 4 GB file and burn to DVD.. that should cut down on the number of DVDs you have to use. Right now Blu-ray burners are expensive but once they are available for cheap, I am sure you could fit every episode of DD on one bluray with no compression.

So if I do DVD back ups now, that should suffice for transfer to another medium later?

Straker wrote:So if I do DVD back ups now, that should suffice for transfer to another medium later?

yes but make a data DVD not one that will work in any DVD player... The data DVD will keep your video file format the same so you can do stuff with it later.

The same program that I use to burn my DVDs should have an option to create a data DVD, is that right?

Hi Guys

A Drobo is a hardware robot. You can put upto 4 harddrives and it spreads the data and protects it if one of the drives fails.

You can also pull out drives and put bigger ones in without loosing data.

Cool eh?

after your post, I watched the YouTube vid about it. It looks good! But, what about the disk you sent me in the post? You had put video on that which I was able to import onto my computer and while the music seemed to cause my PC to crash on one file, the other was able to be used. So...how did you create that DVD Olly? and how can I do the same?

I just did a "simple back up" DVD and backed up data files of Damon Dark from the C Drive, so I guess the data is there if I ever want to restore to my computer...not sure if its much use as an actual archive disk, though...

I think what I did was just to put it onto a cd rather than DVD. The footage was stored as quicktime files... i think.

Well, today my wife delighted me with an early Father's Day present...an external harddrive designed to store video, audio and picture files! I transfered some 28 Damon Dark video files off my C Drive onto it, and barely put a dint in it's 328 Gigs of memory space!

This leave me with plenty of free space on the PC to run software and edit new episodes! At last! Woo hoo!!!

Might be able to upgrade a bit now!