PA Shutterbug Loc: Near Greater Pittsburgh Airport (PIT)

If this is off way topic, I apologize, but I figured there is a tremendous amount of expertise from the UHH folks, so here goes:

My local Southwestern Pennsylvania church body has asked to have archived many hundreds of DVD's, CD's, video tapes (VHS, SVHS, 8, Hi 8, DVC Pro, DV, MiniDV, 3/4 inch U Matic), plus many more posted on YouTube. It is a situation of reduced storage space and availability for future viewing.

It would be prohibitively expensive for us to have this done commercially.

We do have hardware available to presently access these videos.

Our question is what would be the "best" media on which to transfer these videos. We've researched and researched and can not decide what should be our method(s.) We are needing input as to our most dependable, economical, and future proofed way to go. We've considered the cloud, hard drives, DVD's, flash drives, etc. and each has at least one plus and a minus.

Realizing there probably will be no "perfect" solution, we ask for input from the community.

Again, apologizing for what might be off topic and also for the length of the post.

SHALOM from the home of the Steelers, Pirates. Panthers, and Penguins......

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

MDisks. Available in 25 and 100GB sizes.

Cany143 Loc: SE Utah

The archival aspect can be various, CD's, DVD's, external (portable) hard drives, thumb drives, the cloud, whatever might be most convenient and most cost effective for you or anyone who might want to access them at some later point. More concerning, though, is the conversion (from video sources to digital) you'll apparently have to deal with, and while there are many such conversion software packages available --either free or paid for-- it'll take a lot of time to do the conversions and any potential editing that might be worth doing. Video is a whole 'nuther thing than individual image processing. Have a lunch (or three, or maybe four) at hand.

PA Shutterbug Loc: Near Greater Pittsburgh Airport (PIT)

Thank you for your input.

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

If you are talking truly archival, then even MDisks are not a good solution (despite their claimed longevity) simply because in 10 or 25 or 100 years it will become ever more difficult to find a device to play them back (anyone here have their old Jazz drives sitting around?)

Hard drives make the most sense - using an appropriate backup process as well, including rotating multiple backups and keeping one off site - because as technology changes (RS-232 connections, anyone?) they are more easily substituted with newer gear.

Cloud storage inherently deals with backups and tech advancement (after all, the fees you pay to the cloud company are supposed to cover their future acquisitions) but then if the providor you choose goes belly up you might be SOL

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

You’re exactly right, and that is the problem with any media - finding a reader to read it. Moving your data to the most current media every 10-20 years is a part of the archival process. As for the hard drive, I can’t imagine a much worse archival medium (note that I said archival, NOT backup). Have you tried to find a PITA HD interface recently? How about SCSI? Yes you can find either, but the PITA card will probably be ISA bus. You can buy a Beta tape player as well (I have one). There are plenty of issues with HDs, one of the biggest being that a very large percentage of failures occur on start up after being unpowered for long periods (we can discuss the mechanism if you like), the second (in a long list) being that the average user isn’t using enterprise class drives - 95% will be using the cheapest TB/$ drive they can find.

Having spent 25 years in the data storage business for the largest storage companies in existance, I keep a local backup on a separate system (SSD), a DR/archive copy in Amazon S3 cloud and for good measure, MDisks in my bank lockbox, (and some in a fire resistant container in my son’s safe (off-site). Paranoid about my data? You bet, but you won’t find me posting about how my HD failed and I lost 30,000 photos and it will cost $1200 for a professional recovery service - a post we see almost weekly.

We’ve had the cloud/anti-cloud discussion too many times for me to refute all the misconceptions and prejudices against it - I’ll just mention again that a MAJOR cloud provider has never gone belly up, and you should still have two other copies of your data if Amazon, Google, Apple or IBM suddenly goes out of business and shutters all their data centers overnight.

MichaelH Loc: NorCal via Lansing, MI

My understanding of the way SSDs work is that they need power, at least occasionally, in order to retain their data. That would indicate that SSDs would not be a good archival device. Spinning enterprise HDs retain data longer but still would eventually start to loose some data. My guess is that using multiple trusted cloud providers and spinning HDs that were replaced at regular intervals would provide a better guarantee.

Check out this web page - it describes the data retention capabilities of spinning and solid state hard drives:
https://blog.macsales.com/43702-we-bet-you-didnt-know-that-your-hdds-or-ssds-may-need-exercise-too/

Eventually there may be a more long lived technology.

fetzler Loc: North West PA

There are archival quality CDs and DVDs. They are rather expensive but available from Light Impressions.

All electronic media run the risk of being unreadable in the future. You might inquire with the George Eastman house in Rochester, NY regarding their procedures. You could also consider another Museum or Library of high regard.

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

I actually volunteer at a place called the Institute of Historical Survey Foundation and have learned that for archiving purposes, we are among a group including the SMithsonian, the Vatican, the Mormon Church and a number of other places who still use microfilm. But that doesn't help for color or video.

As for hard drives - yes, replacing them over time with newer units (which themselves will have the USB338 or Firewire 77 or whatever the connection du jour is by then) deals with the issue of connectivity. SSDs can fail, by the way. And large cloud providers will likely not go under (though there are no guarantees) but require connectivity, which is not always guaranteed.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I think If you look at the latest data, you’ll see that now that the initial bugs have long since been worked out of the production facilities, SSDs are more reliable than HDs, provided that you power them up periodically. And if Amazon, Google, IBM and Apple go belly up without notice, I suspect we’ll all have bigger problems to worry with than our photos 🙀.

Btw, nothing wrong with B&W microfilm as long as you keep it in decent temperature/humidity conditions and have a reader. I have plenty of B&W negatives (and prints) that are well >60 years old and in perfect condition.

Cheers

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Digitize all the analog media. Any video at or below 480P resolution can be burned to MDisc DVDs. 1080P can be burned to BluRay MDiscs. Burn 4K as data in .MOV or .MP4 format.

Burn audio to MDisc as .AIFF files. Documents should be archived as .PDF files.

Burn three copies of everything. Store them separately, with one set OFF-Site.

Brian S. Loc: Oak Park, MI

Dollar for Dollar conventional hard drives are many, many time more cost effective than Solid State Hard drives. Based on the volume of information that PA Shutterbug mentioned the U.S. Treasury might have trouble affording enough SSHD's to complete his project since they are Very Small capacity wise compared with mechanical drives.

I would think large volume Raid Arrays would be the best alternative for all of the types of media he spoke about. And it would be easier to keep a couple of recent Mac's or PC's running with an interface that could last for numerous years.

Also Raid Arrays can be easily duplicated so that duplicates and be stored at different locations for additional security and redundancy.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

All you can do is use the best of the current technology and then switch over when that becomes obsolete. I use plain old hard drives.

DesignOrc

This topic seems to be coming up almost weekly, especially the subject of obsolescence. It seems we should be asking the experts. Who has a bigger collection of stuff than the Library of Congress, the National Archives, or our nation's large network of various public libraries. Here are a couple of links from Library of Congress and American Library Association.

http://digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/
http://www.ala.org/alcts/preservationweek/howto/digital-preservation-tips

One point that was made is this cannot be a one-time thing. Once you go through the process, it has to become a habit. It has to be something you will look at regularly, else why bother. And make no mistake; whether you are doing your personal stuff or that of your church or boy scout troop, this will be akin to cleaning the Aegean Stables.