Discussion
Hi all,
I recently bought a camcorder and my hard drive is rapidly running out of space!
can anyone recommend something to store the files on? I'm looking for either a fairly large hard drive 1tb+ under £150 or I have heard of some websites that offer unlimited storage for a monthly/yearly fee. Are these sites safe/fast/reliable and can anyone recommend one too me?
I don't know which is best to use as the files off the camcorder are huge (900minutes is 120gb) and ideally we want to keep them as safe as possible as they will be of my son growing up.
Thanks everyone
I recently bought a camcorder and my hard drive is rapidly running out of space!
can anyone recommend something to store the files on? I'm looking for either a fairly large hard drive 1tb+ under £150 or I have heard of some websites that offer unlimited storage for a monthly/yearly fee. Are these sites safe/fast/reliable and can anyone recommend one too me?
I don't know which is best to use as the files off the camcorder are huge (900minutes is 120gb) and ideally we want to keep them as safe as possible as they will be of my son growing up.
Thanks everyone
What kind of PC do you have? If it's a normal PC that has a slot for an extra hard drive, then you're best option is to buy a 1TB internal drive and stick it in there. The benefits of this is that it's fast, and you don't need a separate power supply. Alternatively, get an external 1TB USB hard drive, but bear in mind that transferring that kind of data is painfully slow over USB.
Other alternatives are Network address storage (NAS drives), and firewire external hard drives.
Other alternatives are Network address storage (NAS drives), and firewire external hard drives.
Storing that amount of data reliably isn't going to be cheap. Ignore hard drive and "NAS" solutions, they do not provide backups, merely more storage and perhaps redundancy.
Either invest in a good tape drive, or use one of the online backup services (or perhaps both), I've no experience with any of those I'm afraid.
Either invest in a good tape drive, or use one of the online backup services (or perhaps both), I've no experience with any of those I'm afraid.
ln1234 said:
What kind of PC do you have? If it's a normal PC that has a slot for an extra hard drive, then you're best option is to buy a 1TB internal drive and stick it in there. The benefits of this is that it's fast, and you don't need a separate power supply. Alternatively, get an external 1TB USB hard drive, but bear in mind that transferring that kind of data is painfully slow over USB.
Other alternatives are Network address storage (NAS drives), and firewire external hard drives.
It's a laptop so to expensive and to much hassle to change the HD. I think it may have a firewire port built in though, will check that out. Is it a lot faster?Other alternatives are Network address storage (NAS drives), and firewire external hard drives.
evenflow said:
...another thought:
Can you reduce the size of the files at all? Might help storage.
I can do, I put all the videos onto DVD and that makes the files tiny, ideally though if its not too costly I would like to keep copies of the originals, purely because they are recorded in HD and in years to come i'm sure blu ray will be the standard rather than DVDCan you reduce the size of the files at all? Might help storage.
I use http://www.mozy.com for online backup paired with a couple of 1Tb MyBook Essential Editions for local backup
Oh and you might want to consider re-encoding the video from the camcorder to something smaller but with minimal quality loss (Google for Handbrake)
Oh and you might want to consider re-encoding the video from the camcorder to something smaller but with minimal quality loss (Google for Handbrake)
Edited by furtive on Monday 17th November 13:22
Chocolate Teapot said:
900minutes is 120gb
Are you sure thats right? sounds pretty good to me, or did you mean 90 minutes? Only reason I ask is that we have a mini-DV camera, and i'm pretty sure it's roughly about 1GB of Hard Disk per minute of footage. Personally, I use 2 external hard disks, then I do alternate backups to each of them.I do use Mozy, and its great, but it does take a long time to upload the first backup...I think mine took about 9 days to upload 17gb of photos.
Never store on one item of hardware only. Either buy 2, and make 2 copies, or archive to CD/DVD. Tape solutions for home use probably don't make financial sense. 1TB HDDs are available for under £100 these days which is seriously cheap storage.
I've been nagging people "under my care" for ages only to find one lot of "baby" pictures have been irretrievably lost recently.
I've been nagging people "under my care" for ages only to find one lot of "baby" pictures have been irretrievably lost recently.
colinjm said:
Chocolate Teapot said:
900minutes is 120gb
Are you sure thats right? sounds pretty good to me, or did you mean 90 minutes? Only reason I ask is that we have a mini-DV camera, and i'm pretty sure it's roughly about 1GB of Hard Disk per minute of footage. Personally, I use 2 external hard disks, then I do alternate backups to each of them.I do use Mozy, and its great, but it does take a long time to upload the first backup...I think mine took about 9 days to upload 17gb of photos.
Edited by illmonkey on Monday 17th November 13:41
illmonkey said:
colinjm said:
Chocolate Teapot said:
900minutes is 120gb
Are you sure thats right? sounds pretty good to me, or did you mean 90 minutes? Only reason I ask is that we have a mini-DV camera, and i'm pretty sure it's roughly about 1GB of Hard Disk per minute of footage. Personally, I use 2 external hard disks, then I do alternate backups to each of them.I do use Mozy, and its great, but it does take a long time to upload the first backup...I think mine took about 9 days to upload 17gb of photos.
Edited by illmonkey on Monday 17th November 13:41
A quick google says it's 250mb/minute uncompressed for DV footage, plus it has 16-bit sound at whatever bitrate that is. Also, mine is not an HD camera, but a 3 year old Sony SD mini-DV Cam.
illmonkey said:
colinjm said:
Chocolate Teapot said:
900minutes is 120gb
Are you sure thats right? sounds pretty good to me, or did you mean 90 minutes? Only reason I ask is that we have a mini-DV camera, and i'm pretty sure it's roughly about 1GB of Hard Disk per minute of footage. Personally, I use 2 external hard disks, then I do alternate backups to each of them.I do use Mozy, and its great, but it does take a long time to upload the first backup...I think mine took about 9 days to upload 17gb of photos.
Edited by illmonkey on Monday 17th November 13:41
I think I will go for an additional external hard drive (around 1tb) and just carry on writing everything to a few DVD's and passing them on too family, would be a shame to lose the original files if something did happen to the hard drive but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
www.drobo.com
More than you wanted to spend, but very easy to use and how much are your pictures and videos worth to you?
More than you wanted to spend, but very easy to use and how much are your pictures and videos worth to you?
cottonfoo said:
Storing that amount of data reliably isn't going to be cheap. Ignore hard drive and "NAS" solutions, they do not provide backups, merely more storage and perhaps redundancy.
I would say for home use, they do provide a backup but ONLY a backup - whatever you do, don't use them to store files where they are the only place those files are kept. Home NAS units are handy but they tend to use weird file systems and they're notoriously unreliable.Deva Link said:
I would say for home use, they do provide a backup but ONLY a backup - whatever you do, don't use them to store files where they are the only place those files are kept. Home NAS units are handy but they tend to use weird file systems and they're notoriously unreliable.
NAS units are for storage only, RAID or no, redundancy/storage != backup, "home use" or not - depends how valuable the data are. You'd never want to lose your kids growing up. Whacking it all on 1TB disks is a nightmare waiting to happen IMO, hard drives are just too fragile for longer term storage. Tape drives aren't _that_ expensive, although 200GB a time is a lot and that hardware will cost more.I don't want to get into this argument again, there's a thread on this somewhere
cottonfoo said:
Deva Link said:
I would say for home use, they do provide a backup but ONLY a backup - whatever you do, don't use them to store files where they are the only place those files are kept. Home NAS units are handy but they tend to use weird file systems and they're notoriously unreliable.
NAS units are for storage only, RAID or no, redundancy/storage != backup, "home use" or not - depends how valuable the data are. You'd never want to lose your kids growing up. Whacking it all on 1TB disks is a nightmare waiting to happen IMO, hard drives are just too fragile for longer term storage. Tape drives aren't _that_ expensive, although 200GB a time is a lot and that hardware will cost more.I don't want to get into this argument again, there's a thread on this somewhere
I'd go further and say that tape drives are just as useful a backup as multiple hard disks (redundancy) in a home setting because a tape drive in your house is just as vulnerable to flooding / fire as disks are. Tape only becomes backup when stored off-site. Tape is vulnerable to magnetic fields, all it takes is your kid finding a tape and a fridge magnet and your data now costs a fortune to retrieve... Tape doesn't do very well in fire situations either.
I suppose you can purchase a fireproof safe and put your tapes in there but that's getting expensive and inconvenient. Tape backup is slow as well, terabytes onto any reasonably priced tape unit will take a lot of tapes and a lot of time.
Mozy and other online solutions are good but you're limited by the speed of your internet connection. If you have terabytes to back up then you'd better be on the backbone or you're screwed.
Bottom line to me at the moment is that physical magnetic disks have outstripped any home-user feasible method of 'real' backup (as defined by people who've worked in enterprise data). No reasonable-cost tape drive holds terabytes of data, backing up to DVDs requires hundreds of them, the only offline solution that's cost effective in the home is multiple hard drives. Which isn't backup, as you rightly point out.
Best of a bad bunch is multiple external HDs, some kept in a different location so a house fire doesn't take them all out, and with the most important files on an online backup service backed by someone like EMC (e.g. Mozy). Just beware that the first backup to Mozy will take forever with TBs of data, and if you have one of those pikey internet deals that cap your bandwidth then you'll have to make sure you don't get penalised or booted off....
cottonfoo said:
Deva Link said:
I would say for home use, they do provide a backup but ONLY a backup - whatever you do, don't use them to store files where they are the only place those files are kept. Home NAS units are handy but they tend to use weird file systems and they're notoriously unreliable.
NAS units are for storage only, RAID or no, redundancy/storage != backup, "home use" or not - depends how valuable the data are. You'd never want to lose your kids growing up. Whacking it all on 1TB disks is a nightmare waiting to happen IMO, hard drives are just too fragile for longer term storage. Tape drives aren't _that_ expensive, although 200GB a time is a lot and that hardware will cost more.I don't want to get into this argument again, there's a thread on this somewhere
Not to be pedantic but backup refers to making copies of data so that these additional copies may be used to restore the original after a data loss event, it does not just mean tape.
I also use Mozy, nice and cheap and it runs incrmental backups every day.
I just jumped on the bandwagon, purchased a Netscreen ReadyNAS (2x500gb as a raid-1 mirror).
Mainly its going to be my itunes repository for my Sonos and a backup location for my laptop/desktop. I'm also having daft ideas to use the web-builder function on it to finally unleash our piccys to friends/the-world.
Mainly its going to be my itunes repository for my Sonos and a backup location for my laptop/desktop. I'm also having daft ideas to use the web-builder function on it to finally unleash our piccys to friends/the-world.
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