Is 2TB hard drive good medium to backup analog to digital transfers?

[RyfromNY]

I have a 2TB External Hard Drive. Is that considered a good medium to back up analog video to digital transfers?

I have 14 Hi8/Video8 tapes shot between '90 and 2000 but 9 of that 14 are considered "high priority" for me. Each is 2 hrs long and I want totally non compressed new digital masters. I want these tapes to be viewable in some format well after I am dead (and I am only 27).

[lingyi]

An external hard drive is fine for backups, but it's only one part of a complete 3-2-1 backup plan which means at least two backups on-site and one offsite. The backups can be on mix of hard drives, optical discs or cloud storage. No SSDs or flash drives as they are not safe for archiving data.

[lordsmurf]

That's exactly it -- HDD is fine for backup, but only as 1 copy. You need others for true backup.

The 3-2-1 plan is ideal: (Never heard it called that, not bad. )
- three total =
- two on-site
- one off-site

To expand on lingyi post...

Yes, you can skimp, but just realize it's skimping. 1 on with 1 off, or just 2 on.

Off-site can be work, storage unit, parents/siblings house (not too close, but not too far away), etc.

For the extra backups, it also needs to be a different make/model hard drive, not the same. So a Hitachi, Western Digital, and Seagate. You need to pay attention to things like SMR vs. PMR, GPT vs. MBR, exFAT vs. NTFS vs. others.

Ideally, you'll have a compressed optical (DVD preferably) version of the video, in addition to the magnetic.

I don't trust "cloud" storage (privacy and hacking concerns), and it's often unbearably slow. Plus you have to trust that entity will exist long-term. You're also trusting they're using quality backup hardware, which isn't always the case.

Solid-state is not archival. No SSds, no flash, as mentioned.

[RyfromNY]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lordsmurf

That's exactly it -- HDD is fine for backup, but only as 1 copy. You need others for true backup.

The 3-2-1 plan is ideal: (Never heard it called that, not bad. )
- three total =
- two on-site
- one off-site

To expand on lingyi post...

Yes, you can skimp, but just realize it's skimping. 1 on with 1 off, or just 2 on.

Off-site can be work, storage unit, parents/siblings house (not too close, but not too far away), etc.

For the extra backups, it also needs to be a different make/model hard drive, not the same. So a Hitachi, Western Digital, and Seagate. You need to pay attention to things like SMR vs. PMR, GPT vs. MBR, exFAT vs. NTFS vs. others.

Ideally, you'll have a compressed optical (DVD preferably) version of the video, in addition to the magnetic.

I don't trust "cloud" storage (privacy and hacking concerns), and it's often unbearably slow. Plus you have to trust that entity will exist long-term. You're also trusting they're using quality backup hardware, which isn't always the case.

Solid-state is not archival. No SSds, no flash, as mentioned.

Thanks. I sent you a PM. Am interested in doing business with your company.

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by RyfromNY

Thanks. I sent you a PM. Am interested in doing business with your company.

The PM said to read a post first, but no link was given, and you have several right now.
So trying to make my way to those.

[dpalomaki]

Quote:

I want totally non compressed new digital masters.

Keep in mind the lossless and non-compressed are not exactly the same.

Also keep in mind that periodically you will have to rearchive the files as media and format standards evolve over time, some will become obsolete and not supported by current gear, and as media ages the data may become difficult to read, even with the correct gear.

Consider the problem reading/recovering material archived to back-up tapes, or discs, or hard drive a short 25 years ago. Can you readily find a working PC that can read/mount the 5.25" floppy disc, or 20 MB MFM hard drive from bygone days. And the software needed to read the files. (A perhaps interesting example:, it appears that the current versions of MS Published cannot open files crated in the 1990's versions of MS Publisher.)

[lordsmurf]

That is very true. 4:4:4/SDI./etc is massive overkill for consumer analog tape formats.
Lossless 4:2:2 is all that is needed.

I think Huffyuv will stand the test of time, in terms of video codecs. It, MPEG-2, H.264 as MP4 (MKV is iffy). But, of course, those last two are compressed. I'm not overly convinced that uncompressed AVI will last the test of time, as those as still codecs.

Accessinga 5.25" disk is so expensive now. Thankfully, I moved most of mine to Iomega Zip disks in the 90s, then tho CD-R backups in the late 90s and early 2000s, and those ISOs are not on backup DVDs and HDDs. At least I still have a working Zip drive. We have a lot of legacy publishing software in a VM, including PageMaker, Quark, and Publisher. At least the software isn't a major problem in VMs. We've been around since the late 70s, and a client's daughter recently asked for a document we did in the 90s. And we had it on a backup, was able to open it in the VM, reprint as PDF and emailed it.