archiving & compression

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Samantha,
     Sounds like a great project that should keep people busy for  
years to come.  Regarding hardware, I have 18 LaCie 500GB drives and  
none have ever failed.  Sometimes an individual computer may fail to  
recognize the drive, but this can always be corrected by taking the  
drive to a fresh computer that somehow is more willing to talk with  
it.  Also, I updated the software driver on each drive about 5 months  
back and performance was even better after that.
     Yes, mini-DV cameras will be superceded, so eventually there  
will be a need to copy these media to some new format.  But it should  
be a digital copy and should not loss data.  In the meantime, let's  
just all hang on to our DV cameras and tape decks.
     Regarding the idea of storing your QT movies through iDVD, I am  
not sure what you would gain through that.  Just copying them to DVD- 
ROM should be good enough, I would think.

--Brian MacWhinney