[geeks] I haven't gotten into this yet but I need some advice

[David Cantrell]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 01:32:02PM -0400, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

>     I just hate to do anything that can't be undone with the main dataset.
> And while MPEG-2 really damages video, DivX damages it even more.  But, how
> does one reasonably offline store 100+ gigs of data?

If you want to preserve the quality, use film.  Or buy two enormous hard
disks, and mirror them.  Store the data uncompressed - well, without using
lossy compression anyway.  If you choose to dump it to film, you will need
to be very careful how you store it.  Film is not indestructible.

> Why not just tell her to go DigiBeta if we are going to consider that?  Not
> that I wouldn't mind being able to afford it for myself.

That's not a bad idea.  She doesn't need any digibeta hardware, just needs
to find someone who can transfer onto digibeta.  I know that the TV and
video repair shop in my home-town can, so I'm sure you can find someone
nearby.  She'll then need to pay someone again to transfer from digibeta
to $other_format when it comes time to do anything with the data.  But then,
if she watches the existing media and just uses digibeta as a backup for
when they wear out, that's not really a problem.

Again, you should be careful about storing digibeta, although it's a lot
more robust than plenty of other formats.

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

  engineer: n. one who, regardless of how much effort he puts in
    to a job, will never satisfy either the suits or the scientists