Does anybody knows of a way to back up
Picture files like Nef (Nikon Raw) and Jpegs to
a Mini-DV tape via a camcorder?

The DLT,DDS,etc drives are kind of expensive...
Thanks,Cesar.

JPEGs are recognized by any decent NLE - just throw them on the timeline (you can even automate the process with some NLEs)... add music if you want... then "export to tape". If I'm not mistaking, even Movie Maker can do it. Dunno about the NEFs though... you may need to convert them to some more conventional format first (I suppose NEF is a Nikon proprietary format).

But why would you do this in the first place? You will lose the quality!

Now, if your question is about backing them up in full res, then the answer is definitely no, not with a camcorder - a camcorder will only take digital video and nothing else.

Well it's true that DV is limited to 720x480 NTSC or 720x576 PAL, however.... there's also this: http://www.coolatoola.com/ and this: http://www.dvstreamer.com/

Personally I wouldn't bother however. Hard drives are getting pretty cheap and DV tapes only hold around 17GB while taking an hour to record. Any dropouts in video will just show up as little glitches, but they could render your backup data useless. I remember using a DAT drive to backup our server a number of years ago. What a pain, and you always wondered if the tape could really be read successfully if you ever needed it.

Cesar: the "rumour" is that it may not be reliable enough. I would just burn it
to a couple (!!) of DVD's and/or store them on a harddisk (and burn them to
DVD or something).

Thanks guys for the info...
I am looking for a long,long time storage capability...

HD's,DVD's and CD's...who really knows if
you can retrieve data from those in 30 years..

I've heard that a kind of tape storage do better over time.
Cesar.

30 years from now I would be happy just to be alive! ;-)

I don't know why you think a tape would be in better condition than a hard drive in 2036. Personally, I find tapes a necessary evil when it comes to DV and HDV. I wouldn't even consider them for archival data storage. I just dump everything I want to keep on hard drives. Every year they get bigger and bigger, and as time goes by the old ones just get swallowed up by the new ones. I have files on my 160GB disk that began life on floppies, migrated to a 20MB hard drive, then a 40MB hard drive, etc.

OTOH, I have a big box of cassette tapes from when I was in college (going back almost 40 years ago... yikes! :-P Almost all of them are worthless, aside from sentimental value. They jam due to uneven winding on the spool, the felt pads have all rotted away, the shells are warped, the labels have fallen off. Same thing for a bunch of VHS tapes going back 20 years. And would you really want to fast forward and rewind a stack of tapes to find something you want?

If you want absolute certainly back it up to a couple of harddisks that you
distribute across the country (friends, family) and make sure they are still
alive each year!? If one dies, replace it with a copy of another backup.