best way to save video data?

[joecool]

fellow at'ers,

i've been gradually moving into the world of digital imaging and have recently made the final plunge by purchasing a digital camcorder. now that all my image capture devices are digital i'd like to save source copies of everything to my hard drive, then burn them onto whatever media i want to use for playback - dvd, svcd, the next big thing, etc. since this data is irreplacable i also need a really good backup process. with digital pictures backup hasn't been a problem - one cd can hold a ton of pix, even taken at high resolution. with digital video this starts to become problematic - a single mini-dv cassette can hold many gigs of data! so, i have two problems to solve as i see it:

- find format that can hold the huge amounts of data, and
- find a backup process for these huge amounts of data.

there are two format that meet the bill: dvd and hard disk. here's what i see as the pro's and con's of each:

DVD Pro
- built-in backup - inexpensive and easy to make multiple copies.
- easy to recover data as long as i have a dvd-r.
DVD Con
- DVD writers are expensive.
- competing formats, no idea which one will win.
- compared to hard disks, amount of data/disk is small.
HD Pro
- huge amount of storage space.
- well established format, 10 years from now i'll have no problem getting data off the disk.
HD Con
- big disks are still pretty pricy.
- no backup process - still need dvd OR another hd.
- need a way to keep backups at seperate physical locations for maximum security. doing this with hd's will be a hassle.

so, my question is, how do other people handle this issue? have i missed anything? can you recommend a particular solution?

thanks in advance,

joe

 

[Bluefront]

I'm using DVD Ram-R. You only need one writer, maybe external. DVD readers are cheap as are the media types. If you get one or more large hard drives, you can store data there...plus use DVD disks for off-site backup. Works for me.