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Ask Slashdot: What To Do After Digitizing VHS Tapes? 268

Posted by samzenpus from the now-what? dept.
An anonymous reader writes Now that I've spent close to a month digitizing a desk drawer's worth of VHS tapes, deinterlacing and postprocessing the originals to minimize years of tape decay, and compressing everything down to H.264, I've found myself with a hard drive full of loosely organized videos. They'll get picked up by my existing monthly backup, but I feel like I haven't gained much in the way of redundancy, as I thought I would. Instead of having tapes slowly degrade, I'm now open to losing entire movies at once, should both of my drives go bad. Does anyone maintain a library, and if so, what would they recommend? Is having them duplicated on two drives (one of which is spun down for all but one day of the month) a good-enough long term strategy? Should I look into additionally backing up to optical discs or flash drives, building out a better (RAIDed) backup machine, or even keeping the original tapes around despite them having been digitized?
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Ask Slashdot: What To Do After Digitizing VHS Tapes? More

Ask Slashdot: What To Do After Digitizing VHS Tapes?

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  • Use the cloud, Luke (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Upload them to youtube! The internet never forgets, apparently.

  • Offsite. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kaenneth ( 82978 ) on Monday September 15, 2014 @01:08PM (#47910385) Journal

    Keep a copy in a different building to protect against fire/flood/theft/etc.

    • Re:Offsite. (Score:5, Informative)

      by MightyYar ( 622222 ) on Monday September 15, 2014 @01:24PM (#47910589)

      Definitely this. If you have a buddy or relative willing to have a little NAS box running on their network, you can do something like Crashplan and get offsite backup for "free". I happen to use Crashplan, but rsync would work just fine. Both let you "seed" the initial backup so that you aren't waiting for months to do the initial backup.

      • BTSync seems to be a good candidate for this type of "buddy backup".

        • I looked into BTSync and - at least as of a few months ago - it really had trouble with mixed computer OS environments. It would probably be fine for simple video files, but it did not handle all the Mac metadata on Windows, Windows metadata on Linux, etc. There are workarounds, but nothing I felt like dealing with.

      • and at the reasonable rates they offer for backups, split the cost of a backup license and backup to their cloud.

    • But what about asteroids? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ArcadeMan ( 2766669 ) on Monday September 15, 2014 @01:31PM (#47910685)

      Better to keep a backup on Earth and on Mars, just in case.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by imikem ( 767509 )

        That's it! Now we have a way to finance the Mars colonization, by backing up all those 1980s and 1990s cat videos we just migrated off VHS tape. I'll see about standing up the first off-planet data center later this week.

      • Nah, that will get wiped out when the sun blows up. We need a backup outside the solar system.

        • Come to think of it, we need to send our backups in alternate universes and/or dimensions because our own universe will be destroyed by the next big crunch.

    • Also make sure that whatever backup scheme you are using, that you somehow verify the data is actually good. You don't want to have to recover from a backup in 10 years, only to find out that "Grandma's 80th Birthday" video is corrupted.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Archfeld ( 6757 ) *

      A simple and very secure offsite storage answer is a bank safe deposit box. Put your movies on a thumb drive and stash it with your life insurance policy and other 'stuff' in a box at your bank. Relatively cheap or maybe even free depending on your bank, very likely local with standard access times to make recovery easy.

    • Safe deposit box (Score:4, Interesting)

      by wiredog ( 43288 ) on Monday September 15, 2014 @01:52PM (#47910917) Journal

      External hard drives are cheap. I Have one in the safe deposit box at the bank, one at home, and I rotate them every couple of months. I just do a copy of /Users (on my Mac, /home on Linux, not sure what the WIndows equivalent is) to the hard drive.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pomakis ( 323200 )
        That's exactly what I do too. As an extra safety measure, I keep a checksums.md5 file containing the MD5 checksums of all of my videos. That way there's never any guessing as to whether or not anything has gone corrupt. Also, if one of the two drives shows even the slightest signs of becoming unreliable, I swap it out for a new one right away.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by unimacs ( 597299 )
        I did something similar for awhile but instead of a safe deposit box, I just left a drive at work. The only problem with this approach is that you have to remember to rotate the drives and any important content that's created between rotating the drives has the potential to be lost.

        So now I have a mac mini (could be a PC or linux server though) that's hooked to our TV as a media server. It has a great big external drive that's used for time machine. Our laptop backs up to it as well. In addition I use Cr

        • I have an HP Microserver with the Xpenology software on it. It serves as a Time Machine for the Mac, it has some iSCSI targets which are mounted on the Windows Machines as backup drives, and Synology Cloudstation serves as a DropBox like service which means that my most important documents can be synced remotely.

      • On Windows, you want C:\Users and C:\ProgramData. ProgramData is a hidden folder.

  • Ashes to Ashes ... (Score:4, Informative)

    by powerlord ( 28156 ) on Monday September 15, 2014 @01:10PM (#47910423) Journal

    ... Tape to Tape

    If you're looking purely at longevity of storage and reliability, Tape backup is still the way to go.

    Baring that, spread backup copies around, and make sure to keep redundant copies on several flash drives?

  • Literally anything can get posted as an Ask Slashdot these days. This one isn't as bad as some, but when did Ask Slashdot become a substitute for a basic Google search. It's not like you're not gonna get zero hits for "long term video tape backup"

    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ravaldy ( 2621787 ) on Monday September 15, 2014 @01:22PM (#47910557)

      Considering how many users on this forum will learn something from this I would say it's not a complete waste of time.

      I spent countless hours searching the web. Unfortunately there is no straight answer but I do have one after trying many pieces of software. I'll post this in a different post

    • Yeah, I guess I should ask Slashdot if anyone knows what happened to Konashion [blogspot.ca] because SuperDeepthroat hasn't been updated in a hwile.

    • On one hand, yes, you'll get tons of hits on Google for "long term video tape backup."

      On the other hand, many of those hits will be old forum posts whose authors' experience is unknown, companies advertising their services (quality of which is unknown), etc. Posting on Slashdot ensures that your question will be answered by a group of experiences folks who know what they are talking about and have likely done just this sort of thing.

  • Back up to optical media (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I archive my home movies in three ways:

    1. Keep highest quality copy on my always-spinning hard drive
    2. Keep highest quality copy on someone else's online storage, such as Mega.co.nz, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.
    3. Make regular copies to DVDs (and starting this year, Blu-rays) and distribute to my family members for their own collection. They in turn do the same with theirs.

    This way if anything were to happen to one copy, there's always other locations to get a copy of it.

    • Re:Back up to optical media (Score:4, Interesting)

      by C0L0PH0N ( 613595 ) on Monday September 15, 2014 @01:41PM (#47910795)
      I second this approach. Keep a "master archive" of highest quality, both on local hard drives and backed up to the cloud (BackBlaze for example has unlimited backup for $5/mo). Then provide "exhibit" copies at a lower quality to the web and to friends. Backing up the "master archive" is critical! The "derivative" files shared out aren't so critical, as they can be reconstructed from the "master archive". An example is MPEG-2 will preserve videos at high quality, but with large file sizes. Scanning slides to TIF at say 4800 dpi will create 20mb files. These are "master archive" material. But you can prepare a copy of the video as an MPEG-4 or H.264 at much lower quality and much lower file size, that will still look stunning over the web. And you can derive JPGs from the master TIFs that at much lower quality, still look stunning over the Internet, for example. But for posterity, the "master archive" can become a museum collection for your descendants that they will cherish. An interesting thing to ponder is, will the US ever get hit with a few EMP nuclear bursts? If so, they may wipe out all magnetic media everywhere. That is where backups on optical disks, say, Blu-Ray, would be valuable. May be being a little paranoid there? :). For more information on this approach, consult http://archivehistory.jeksite.... [jeksite.org].

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by itzly ( 3699663 )
        The concept of "master archive" of old VHS tapes has a certain funny ring to it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ichijo ( 607641 )

        Backing up the "master archive" is critical! The "derivative" files shared out aren't so critical, as they can be reconstructed from the "master archive". An example is MPEG-2 will preserve videos at high quality, but with large file sizes.

        I agree that backing up the master archive is critical, but for video that archive should be the original file created by the video capture system, preferably a non-lossy archival format such as FFV1 or HuffYUV in order to reduce or eliminate generation loss and retain a

      • Seriously, cloud based backup is not the panacea you want to believe that it is. Think about it... With "unlimited storage for $5/mo", how does a company like BackBlaze have any viability? Right now, if you were to store 10TB of data (which has been thrown around in some of the other posts), their ROI is insanely high. Even if they went cheap and bought SATA 3.5" drives, a 4TB drive (on Pricewatch) will run $118, or $28.3167/TB. Let's say they can buy drives in bulk at $25/TB, 10TB would cost them $250

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Aaden42 ( 198257 )

          For cloud-based storage I care about viability. If they go out of business and take my one cloudy copy with then, I’m screwed.

          For cloud-based backup, that’s a different story. If they go out of business, I only care if it happens to occur in the timeframe that my own local copy is damaged. It’s certainly in the realm of possibility that would happen, but I’m okay with those odds given the price Backblaze, Crashplan, and others are currently charging. If it should happen that they

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by suutar ( 1860506 )

          True, but 10TB is not the average user. Probably most of their customers have single-drive laptops or desktops.

          Newegg doesn't seem to have any laptops with more than 1TB disk, so let's call that a typical disk size. Most users won't have a second disk. Assume a typical home user's desktop/laptop has about a terabyte (my laptop has half that), and assume they've managed to get it 75% full of the kind of stuff Backblaze's app will back up. That's 750GB per user, which at their posted hardware price (for the d

  • Lasts thousands of years, just ask the egyptians. Or recognize that it is not worth the expense.

  • Are They? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 15, 2014 @01:22PM (#47910555)

    If they are naked vids of you and your GF, the Internet will gladly archive millions of copies.

  • Just uplad everything, and let the netowrk be your backup.

  • CrashPlan (Score:3)

    by Ravaldy ( 2621787 ) on Monday September 15, 2014 @01:25PM (#47910595)

    I had a similar problem as you and I found what I consider the best solution for home users. There are many options where you can store you data in the cloud for a yearly fee but it does get expensive as you pass the 200GB mark. What I use is Crashplan. Their software allows you to backup to their cloud or to a friends storage. So if you know someone else with the same problem you can have them allocate some space on their machine for you and you do the same for them. The backups are protected so he won't be able to play with your data. This is all at no charge.

    I personally use the Enterprise version which allows you to host your own server. I have my reasons for doing this but most users will be happy with the free home version.

  • Analog Data fairs better when it isn't touched, every read could damage it a bit, and copying a copy of a copy using analog methods will degrade its content.

    For digital data, it wants to be moved around.
    The more you copy and move digital data the better it is.
    Raid Disks makes sure you have a couple of copies.
    You post it the cloud and it will last longer.
    You could get fancy and have a backup method that copies your data from one drive to an other. When it fails you swap the drive out with a new one.

  • Git Annex ( http://git-annex.branchable.co... [branchable.com] ) (if you're a geek) is the perfect answer to maintaining multiple copies of digital data.

  • I have two external disks on alternating cadences of backup. At any given time, one or both of them are in a desk drawer at work (while I work, I keep both there, and take home the one that needs to be run that night).

    Cloud for me is impractical as the price structure is pretty steep at these capacities. Even if it wasn't, my bandwidth is inadequate for the task. Offsite backup to my desk drawer is adequate.

    You can encrypt the backups if you are concerned about the privacy of such a setup (the desk drawe

  • Amazon Glacier (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Amazon Glacier is for long term storage of lots of data. While they only provide an API, it is easier to code to and 3rd party interfaces exist should you want a GUI.

    It is also dirt cheap. My current bill is less than $1 per month. You'll pay more to access the data should you need to but storage is priced reasonably.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bhlowe ( 1803290 )
      Agree. Having had an unexplained crash wipe out all 4 drives in a NAS... I now back everything up to S3 Glacier. Yes, I might try Crash Plan with a friend to do it for me and vice versa, but.. Amazon is hard to beat.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Asgard ( 60200 ) *

      You can use S3 to interact with glacier; create a 'VHS Archive' bucket with a bucket policy to migrate to Glacier after X days. Upload everything there and let it sit; this sort of use case is *exactly* the sort of thing Glacier was intended for.

  • If you really want to save your data:

    Step 1: make a ZFS array and save your data there.
    Step 2: copy the data to single hard-drives and store them in a different location then home.
    Step 3: upload a copy to some online 'cloud storage' provider.

    Use checksums/md5 hashes to determine data integrity.

    Based on your budget pick any of the above 3. If you are paranoid, do all 3.

  • What To Do After Digitizing VHS Tapes?

    Might as well just lie down and wait for death. You're never going to top this!

    Alternative pop culture reference:

    There's plenty of things you can do to pass the time: hitch up your pants, air whittle, make friends with a Chinese man...

  • stop asking stupid questions about vhs to /. every few days

  • that works... rsync to offsite nas or friends server. Possibly even bittorrent sync

  • In addition to my "online" storage pools, I keep a three-way ZFS mirror on encrypted hard drives of everything that is irreplacable. If you have more than fits on one disk, maybe use a 1+0 or 1+5, even, setup. This story does depend upon you being able to connect two complete copies of your backup to one machine at a time, so again, if it's really a lot of data, external RAID enclosures may be in your future. In any case, one of the full copies lives off-site and every month I grab one of the two at home

  • A few options for backup (I used all of these for my collection):

    * Buy a bunch of USB external HD's, put the movies on them, and send them off to various members of your family (they'll love to have them too)!
    * Upload everything to a Private YouTube account, then give your family access to them
    * Backup to a Hard Drive, and place it offsite
    * Carbonite or Dropbox

  • analog media is cleverly resistant to flaky format changes, bit rot, drive death, one too many cycles of use on a flash drive, and system obsolence. as long as there are any tinkerers around, there is a way to pull off one more pass of an analog media item.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      flaky format changes, .. system obsolence

      No,VHS itself is getting harder to get a recorder for.

      bit rot, one too many cycles of use on a flash drive,

      No VHS notoriously looks worse and worse over time. Digital tolerates bit rot losslessly up to a threshold, then starts getting artifacts. Those artifacts are frequently no worse than how terrible VHS looks by that point of degradation

      Sure keep the analogs since there is no harm, but don't expect them to fare better than digital backups

  • You will never watch them again anyway. Most meticulously saved data is never accessed again.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Richy_T ( 111409 )

      This is the truth.

      Ideally, if one were truly archiving, you'd keep the original media around but the truth of the matter is that one is probably digitizing in order to be able to throw out what are basically big and bulky items that truthfully have little value but you just can't throw away without feeling a little guilty.

      I have a big stack of negatives I inherited from my grandparents. The truth is that probably no one who knows anyone in those pictures is still alive. We have left the era when that kind o

  • just don't drop the box...

  • nas4free, raidz2, primary/secondary server, rsync (Score:3)

    by karlandtanya ( 601084 ) on Monday September 15, 2014 @01:56PM (#47910967)

    2 servers are set up raidz2 with 4 disks per server. So about 6-7 TiB of actual storage space.
    The servers do dns, mysql, and smb via plugins and a jail.
    the primary backs up to the secondary every evening.

    All the TVs in the house are really xbmc clients connecting to the SMB shares and mysql.

    The most expensive part of it is the 8ea 4T HDDs.
    Unless you have 10 people in your house watching different TVs at the same time, you can use real low end computers.
    disks are $150 ($120 if you get externals on sale from huevonuevo & open the box). Excellent computer for this is a Dell poweredge T20 ($300).
    These T20s have ECC RAM (you want this)
    Anyhow 8*150 + 2*300 + a hundred bucks for misc. cables, bootable memory stick, maybe a switch...
    Under 2 grand for the whole mess. Put one in your basement and one in your attic. Then you are protected from a flood or a tornado--but not both together.
    If your house burns down, though, you're hosed ;).

    Upgrade plan is to "destroy" (that's the command...) the zpool in the secondary then change it from raidz2 with 4 disks to raidz2 with 6 disks.
    let rsync do its thing, then swap the usb keys with the embedded OS.
    Repeat with the old primary which will now be the secondary.
    Already tried this once; works no problem. At any given moment I'm tolerant to at least 2 disk failures.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      I would argue that the raid is useless. Better to use the excess drive capacity for rsnapshot external with off site backup.

      If theft or fire takes out your place, then that data is safe. Such an event would still be traumatic, but at least the data would be intact.

  • Try to understand the impermanence of data and let them go. You are just going to torrent the blue ray rips next time you want to watch them anyways.

  • Any medium will ultimately fail, over long enough spans of time.
    Further, just the transcribing process itself has chances of introducing errors.

    Personally:
    - back them up to the cloud. That's about the closest thing you're going to get to "permanent" storage, as you're outsourcing your (individual) chance of hardware failure to some online entity that (at least allegedly) backs up things redundantly across multiple methods, and/or
    - just stop being OCD about it. At a certain point, trying to 'preserve' thin

  • At any time, a proper setup involves maintaining a minimum of three copies of any important data:
    1) The copy you use.
    2) Your local backup.
    3) Your off-site backup.

    How you choose to implement those can vary. For instance, if you have the cash, I think most of us would agree that maintaining separate RAID arrays for your in-use and local backups would be ideal. The reason you'd keep them separate is because of the all-important mantra: RAID is not the same as having a backup (you don't seem to be under this mi

  • So, I did this with all of my movies, VHS, DVD, BluRay ect.. I ended up with a very large library of video on my computer. In my computer I used an Adaptec 5805 RAID controller with backup battery and 4 3TB WD Red HDD's to store all the data in a RAID 5. I am also running a PLEX Server [www.plex.tv] to organize and add meta data to all of the video files as well as serve them to the HTPC and Roku 3 in my house. As for backup I purchased an account with Crash Plan. [code42.com]

    With all of this I get a nice organized library for all m

  • You are interested in long-term reliable storage of this data, no?
    After digitizing your videos, use uuencode and print the resulting files on acid-free paper.

  • I also digitized our family VHS tapes and other old stuff.

    I keep one copy on my home computer/server for watching and using.
    I keep one copy on a USB hard drive in a fire-proof safe in my basement.
    I keep one copy on a USB drive in the trunk of my car.
    And I copied the data to my dad and siblings hard drives too.

  • I store my offsite backups at my office. To do this effectively, I use three backup HDDs. One sits in a SATA dock at home, and mirrors my data every hour. The other two are at the office. Every so often, I take one of the HDDs home and stick it in the dock so that it updates to the latest version of my data, then I bring it back to the office. Next time, I take the other HDD home. This ensures that one of the HDDs is always offsite, and all three of the HDDs are never in the same place.

    The obvious downside

  • The things I care about a lot I copy to a hard drive once a year or so and place them in my safety deposit box at the bank. Some things I also re-copy to DVD's.
    It's affordable and easy to access long-term storage. It's also about as fire-proof as you can get, and I suspect that it would be about as EMP proof as you can reasonably expect outside of a mountain. There is near zero chance of flooding where my bank is, but that may be a concern in other locations.

  • For my office data, I have an external HDD that uses rsnapshot to create incremental snapshots every hour, day, week, and month. The server data is also mirrored to each desktop in the office, and my laptop, daily. For offisite backups (other than my laptop), I use duplicity to backup to Amazon S3, which costs about $3 per month. I realize that there are some security issues with this setup.

  • Store them on dvc tapes.

  • The underlying question has absolutely nothing to do with video, digitized from VHS or not. The question is, "How can I securely back up a shitload of data that I don't want to lose?"

    Now that you've forgotten about the video aspect and just think of it as bytes, the problem is reduced to one that's been solved a zillion times over. Google "offsite backup".

    Personally, I use RAID on my home NAS, and rsync the really important stuff daily to an encrypted 1.5TB drive sitting on my desk at work. If you don'

  • Burn to M-Disc (Score:4, Informative)

    by guytoronto ( 956941 ) on Monday September 15, 2014 @03:18PM (#47911787)
    Burn them to M-Disc. As long as there is a DVD player somewhere, no worries. M-Disc doesn't degrade like magnetic media or dye-based optical media.

  • I once had a RAID5 array with 4 disks on my home computer. Two disks were connected to the motherboard, and two were connected to a SATA PCI card because the MoBo didn't have enough SATA slots. One day, the PCI card had a little hiccup, and two of the 4 disks got out of sync. The array was toast. Note that my RAID5 array contributed to this failure -- it would not have happened if I had not been running RAID (and if I hadn't made a poor configuration choice). Fortunately, I had a backup.

    RAID is great for pr

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by debest ( 471937 )

      Fortunately, I had a backup.

      Well, good, because (as anyone who is considering running RAID should know) RAID is not a backup! "RAID" and "backup" are mutually exclusive. As you point out, RAID is only useful when you need high availability and ability to recover from drive failure with minimum fuss. Your horror story was caused by trying to build a RAID5 array (only one drive's capacity of redundancy) on a computer where the loss of either of 2 controllers meant the loss of the entire array. And using cheap controllers, on top of

      • Agreed. Mirroring is not a backup either, because data corruption or erroneous deletion happens on both drives.

        A true backup goes to media (which could be another drive) which is then disconnected from the computer and stored somewhere else. The further away (within reason) the better.

        A good plan might be to cultivate a friend who also has data he doesn't want to lose, and store each other's backups, thus protecting both of you from local disaster (like a house fire).

  • As the original aim was to record the memories of the event, the best back up is to create new memories as soon as possible. Sit your kids in front of the monitor and subject ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H show them the videos. Provide plenty of glucose and caffeine so that they back up the memories as accurately as possible. Verbal annotations will help too.
    If you want extra back-up diversity, invite members of your close family, and then extended family, work, church, sewing club, etc., to multiple showings. Produce fill

  • As a photographer with over 100k clicks on three bodies, I have just over 2 TB of my own photos on a dedicated drive. I have a two step backup system:

    1) With a USB "drive toaster", perodically back up my files to a raw drive, mark it with a sharpie, and put it on the shelf in a different part of the house.

    2) About twice a year, ghost my primary storage to a brand new drive, install the new drive in place of the old drive, mark the old drive with a sharpie, drive it over to a friend's house and put it in h

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