Hello I would like to get the suggestion.
As many people are moving from MiniDV tapes to tapeless format, I would like to back up also my tapes.
Some people recommend to back up to uncompressed bit by bit format DV AVI.
Some to mp4 (H264) format.

What is your experience ?

I would recommend taking the DV video stream directly off the tape and back that up. The DV on the tape is already compressed and digital so no need to do anything else to it other than make a safety copy.

I agree - big files, though? However, DVDs are cheap.

Thank you.
I was thinking about external HDD, but 1 tape is around 13GB, that would be a lot of DVD´s for around 60 tapes.

If I would convert the files to mp4 in Premiere, I could export each tape in a couple of small files by date or event.
But If I go with straight copy to HDD then I have one big AVI file. How would you then organise it in case you have 60 tapes?

Thank you for your suggestions.

I have backed up a lot of my DV and HDV tapes to LTO3 data tape. A 400G LTO3 tape is about $30 Can and will store over 30 DV tapes as they of course are not all full. Since the DV data files will have all the data and time and timecode info embedded using the file is just the same as capturing from the tape. Data tape is a lot more reliable than video tape and is fast to backup or restore. Read/ write is as fast as the hard drives will go about 65MBps on my system. I moved to LTO3 as the backup system for my AVCHD files so also used to backup the tapes too. If I were to buy now I would move to the LTO4 or LTO5 models with faster transfer speeds and capacility.

Ron Evans