Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

Angelo Sacerdote, BAVC Preservation Specialist

Do you have DATs, DV tapes, other digital tape media that are important
to you? In my video preservation work I encounter tapes in various
states of breakdown and I dread the thought of dealing with digital tape
if it starts falling apart. On an analog tape, if you have dropout, it
is just a little blip that goes by. On a digital tape, a dropout can
represent a devastating loss of ones and zeros, a loss of vital audio
and video. So the best plan is to move your data off of these tiny,
fragile digital tape formats as soon as possible, migration instead of
preservation.

I think the future of audio and video archiving is hard drives. Once
your media is digital, all you need is a computer to migrate to a better
hard drive in the future. Hard drives are getting more inexpensive and
increasingly reliable.

You must have redundancy if you are going to move to hard drives. While
they are reliable, they still fail. Your solution can be as simple as
having to hard drives of the same size, kept in different locations for
safe keeping, or you can buy or build a mirrored RAID. Whatever you do,
be organized and keep a list of what is in your archive.

If you have a DV camera and a computer, you can migrate your DV tapes
yourself. Just capture the whole tape to a hard drive and name it the
same as your tape. An hour of DV is already compressed, so it is less
than 13 GB (compared to 95 GB for uncompressed video). You can fit over
35 hours on a single 500 GB hard drive. If you double the cost of a
hard drive for redundancy, it is only $14 per hour of DV, a bargain next
to future recovery.

DAT tapes have been around even longer than DV. If you care about your
DATs, get them transferred to hard drives yesterday (you can do that at
BAVC if you don’t have a DAT player). Being audio only, storage of DAT
data is even more economical.

I hesitate to recommend optical media like CDs and DVDs for archiving,
unless it is just the copy of what is on a hard drive. Optical media
are susceptible to chemical breakdown and scratching. Whatever storage
media you use has it’s own risks and is not a permanent home for your
data. You need to periodically check the integrity of your data and
migrate it to something new in the future. Maybe one day we will have
safe permanent data storage, but I doubt it.