An Interesting Point. What To Do About Archives

[William Hofius]

The recent conversation about trying to re-import material from a DVD 
raises an interesting question (for me at least)–How should one archive 
their digital video projects?

I am a pack-rat in just about every aspect of my life and have found 
the same to be true of my digital lifestyle. I have only made a dozen 
or so small iMovie projects, so I have kept all of the original iMovie 
projects intact on my hard drive. I made a folder called "Finished 
iMovie Projects" and once I have exported the iMovie to its final 
format I place the iMovie project in this folder... just in case. Just 
in case I need to re-export it, just in case I want to tweak it at a 
later date, just in case.

The problem is this consumes a lot of space. As my iMovie projects have 
gotten longer, the iMovie projects have gotten bigger. I have gone from 
a 20 GB Digital Video partition to an 80 GB partition and now that is 
almost full.

Making the space problem worse is the fact that my last few projects 
have been done in Final Cut Express. These projects required that I 
import several hours of digital video. Between the capture video, 
render files, etc., these three projects consume nearly 80 GB in and of 
themselves.

I have been tempted to trash all of my finished projects, but was 
recently reminded why I keep them in the first place. My in-laws asked 
me for a VHS copy of all of my work so they could watch it in Japan. 
(They are older Japanese and not very computer savvy.)

OH, and just in case anything goes wrong, I keep all of my old tapes 
around. After learning a hard lesson (forgot to import some footage 
before I re-recorded over it), I buy new DV tapes for each and every 
project.

Enough blathering and down to the point. How do you fine folks archive 
your digital media and your digital media projects? Do you keep 
projects on hard drives forever? Burn projects as data to DVDs? Keep 
the original tapes around? just don't worry about it?

TIA