[MacDV] Back UP storage options???

[Steven Rogers]

On Tuesday, January 21, 2003, at 04:59 PM, Frank Flynn wrote:

> What does the list recommend for storage like this?  Some of these 
> projects are 20Gb or so.  I do have Retrospect (express which came 
> with Norton).

Retrospect is only fair at this for a couple of reasons. First, it 
can't get much compression on the files, and second, what you're 
wanting to do is archiving while Retrospect has a lot of features to 
support *backups* which is not the same thing. When you archive 
something, you make one image of it and put it in a safe place in case 
you want to restore it. When you make backups, you're taking frequent 
pictures of something that is changing - a work in progress (e.g. your 
home folder with pictures, your Quicken files, etc.) and cataloging 
what changed on each snap shot so you can get back any particular 
version of something from the past. Retrospect is tuned to support this 
multi-snapshot backup concept, and some of its features just become 
annoying if you only want to write one copy of something that is "done" 
to save it for the future.

> -I don't see tape drives advertised or pushed like they used to be.  
> Are these still viable?  Do they have OS X compatible drivers?

Yes, but to be practical for video, you'd have to get an "Enterprise" 
(as in big organization, not starship) class tape backup system that 
could write many GB onto a single tape very fast. And they're 
expensive. A little USB Travan is not going to work. (calculate time to 
write a tape, and cost of blank tapes).

> -I do have a SuperDrive - I could use DVD media as file storage, I 
> don't know how this would work but after burning iDVD's (which can 
> take several hours) I'm thinking it would be slow.  But the blanks are 
> getting cheap.

Yeah, I tried this, but gave up because of the slow speed. It was 
taking me 24 hours and 24 disks just to save out moderate projects.

> -Zip drives?  Aren't they small capacity and expensive for the blank 
> disks?

Yeah - it would take about 470 of the 100 MB zip disks to cover one 
DVD-R. Yikes.

Another option is to write your completed projects back to DV tape from 
iMovie. This is about the only practical way to store the raw footage 
for potential future editing.

SR