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Posted by JT on 12/07/05 06:11
Personal experience flavors our decisions. I buy hard drives that are
well thought of (Seagate) and make sure they run cool, and I have yet
to have a significant failure.
When I shoot fixed-location I record directly to hard drive. I run
tape for redundancy, worrying mostly about computer failures or
oopsies, but barring that I end up with DV video on a drive, ready to
edit. When I'm done, I clean off the expendable files and consider the
drive the primary archive. Since I don't re-use tape, I have that
also, but don't expect that I'll ever need it.
But the real joy of having external USB hard drives is that I never
have to mess with tape or capture. I can plug the drive(s) into an
edit station and go right to work. Same for six months from now. As a
bonus for that surprise 6-month revisit to the project, I'll have the
project files there, too, and everything is as I left it, ready to go
to work.
If I did want to re-use the tape for economy, and had had a bad
experience with a drive, I'd simply amend my ways and use RAID pairs
for backup. PPro in particular does a fine job of copying a project.
It takes time (but much faster than realtime) but is a job that would
happen when the project rush is over. Using a pair of drives is still
cost effective even for $8 miniDV tape, and an absolute bargain for
$33 DVCAM. And the chance of both a RAID pair failing is probably
right up there with the camera's head drum disintegrating and taking
the tape with it.
"Richard Crowley" <rcrowley@xpr7t.net> wrote:
>":::Jerry::::" wrote ...
>> "JT" wrote ...
>>> In any case, at .25/GB storing DV files (and the project file) on a
>>> hard drive costs less than leaving it on a high-quality tape
>>> (Excellence at say $8/hour vs $3 for 12GB of disk space).
>>
>> The purchase price tag might well favour HDD storage but how much
>> would data recovery cost if a HDD failed, the point I'm making is
>> that tape based storage often only fails only partially and much data
>> can often be retrieved cheaply or at no cost.
>
>I have lost many hours of valuable video thinking that HDD
>was a viable option to expensive DVCAM tapes ($33 each).
>Then after a couple of the HDDs died, I learned my lesson the
>hard way.
>
>If the stuff you have shot isn't even worth $5 per mni-DV
>tape, why even bother with archiving it?
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