warning on formats and media

[Joe Stemberger]

Brian,

Thanks for the reminder about the MP3 and DVD formats.

I have a follow-up question to this statement:

> For both video and audio, it is important to preserve your  original 
> uncompressed media as your archival source.  For audio, this  means 
> the WAV files.  For video, it typically means the mini-DV  cassettes 
> used by a digital recorder or the original VHS.
>
Storing WAV files is easy and cheap. And they're easy and cheap to copy. 
An hour of uncompressed sound is only 600MB, after all.

But video is something else entirely, since each hour is 15GB. Although 
I COULD break up each 40-60-minute-long recording session into 3 or 4 
parts and back them up as files on DVD disks (not in DVD format), I find 
that I don't. I do rely on the original mini-DV tapes for archiving.

Can you tell us how long mini-DV cassettes last before they degrade? 
When do I need to think about backing them up to another storage medium?

(I've heard that DVD disks are supposed to last for 100 years --- but 
since they havn't been around for anywhere near that long, I have my 
doubts about how much I can rely on that. Still, maybe 30 years?)


Thanks!


---Joe Stemberger
Linguistics
University of British Columbia
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