I have a load of m2t files from Vegas that are too big for my DVD burner - how are people doing this?

I saw recently for sale at newegg.com a 500 gig SATA drive for $99.

That's like twenty cents a gig.

The next generation discs, like a 25 gig Blu-Ray is like $20

That's about seventy nine cent a gig, but once prices come down and the next generation media[along with fast recordable speeds...currently looks like they burn at 2x speeds] it will probably be a good option.

For now maybe, just back it back up to tape?

No, the problem is not the hard drive - it is backing it up to another medium. My hard drive recently went and I don't want to run into the problem I am having right now, so I want to find another medium to save the files. I don't know, can DVD span video clips?

Best I can come up with is to manually capture your m2t footage in manageable sections (approx. 4.5gb or 22 minutes) from your camera to your hard drive and then burn each section as a data file on DVD.

I can't believe there isn't anything for this - or why someone wouldn't come up with something, RARing can archive across multiple floppies, so I would think the same technology would work for other things, but then again I am not a software designer.
I might have to buy a hard drive and use it only for storage purposes. That is disappointing.

Are the .m2t files are ready to be sent back to the camera?

If I had the finished project that is waiting to eventually be authored to HD-DVD/Blu-Ray, I would just send the stream back to the camera and on to tape as a backup.

When you are ready to author the next generation HD disc, just dump the raw .m2t tape back to your computer. Demux it the raw mpeg and audio stream and use it in your authoring program. [There should be no quality loss at this point right?]

As for Hard Drive reliability--at the prices Hard Drives are going for nowadays, it seems to me that a RAID would be an affordable option.

On the Mac, you can do it already with the internal bays, and choosing to format two internal drives as a raid array.

My mistake by not giving enough information - the mt2 files are just to be backed up for future use RAW - not to be played on a DVD.

LTO3 tape is the pro way to go ... but the drives aren't cheap

I am hoping for a digital alternative in software, thanks though.
I heard that gsplit and others, but I have no experience with them.

No, the problem is not the hard drive - it is backing it up to another medium. My hard drive recently went and I don't want to run into the problem I am having right now, so I want to find another medium to save the files. I don't know, can DVD span video clips?

You can use TSSplitter (Lossless Splitting and Joining of MPEG Transport Stream Files) and then burn the segments to DVD:

http://www.ffprojects.net/tssplitter/tssplitter.htm

TSSplitter supports both MPEG2 and H.264 files.

thank you, I'll try that.

3 DVDs per minidv tape, plus the time to split/remerge them .. sounds like a time-consuming hassle ..?

Can obviously respect that you have your reasons though- let us know how the splitting program works for you, would be cool to know if it's possible!

No, the problem is not the hard drive - it is backing it up to another medium. My hard drive recently went and I don't want to run into the problem I am having right now, so I want to find another medium to save the files. I don't know, can DVD span video clips?

Why not just back up to more than one drive? HDD's are still better than DVD. I think you might be biased because of this one bad experience - I wouldn't abandon HDD's just yet.

If you work on a Mac, you can use Roxio Toast 8. Toast can span one file across multiple DVD/CDs. It's very easy with Toast.- http://www.roxio.com

For the PC Roxio make Easy Media Creator 9 - http://partner.roxio.com/enu/oem/generic/emc/default.html

External hard drives can be a great way to go as well. There are a number of really great Firewire & USB drives available now at good prices. I've got a 500 gig WD myBook that's very performant. It's small and portable as well and I can hook it up to any machine I want to. If you think about storage space, that 500 gigs can hold the equivalent of over 50 dual layer DVDs. It's smaller in size than 50 DVDs and I can read & write to it much faster that I can burn all that data to DVD! You can even daisy chain them together, up to 48 over firewire I believe.

--Steve

Why not just back up to more than one drive? HDD's are still better than DVD. I think you might be biased because of this one bad experience - I wouldn't abandon HDD's just yet.

I agree 100%. I've had students come to me asking if I still have their material from a previous year because their DVD would no longer play. Sometimes it's their fault because of cheap media or mishandling but I still don't trust DVDs for archiving purposes.

External hard drives can be a great way to go as well. There are a number of really great Firewire & USB drives available now at good prices. I've got a 500 gig WD myBook that's very performant. It's small and portable as well and I can hook it up to any machine I want to. If you think about storage space, that 500 gigs can hold the equivalent of over 50 dual layer DVDs. It's smaller in size than 50 DVDs and I can read & write to it much faster that I can burn all that data to DVD! You can even daisy chain them together, up to 48 over firewire I believe.

--Steve

I agree 100% with Steve on this. At 500Gb for about $150 or less, you can't beat portable hard drives for a pretty darn reliable form of backing up .m2t files. Let's face it, you are probably not going to be running the drive all that often and from a reliability factor, I think HDD technology has proven to be fairly reliable.

If you are *really* self consience about losing data, then buy twice as many portable hard drives, backup the data identically on both drives, then take your secondary backup device and put it in a safe deposit box at the bank or bring it to a friends house. Now you've covered yourself should some disaster happen to your home/office and the cost to do this is *still* relatively cheap considering the value of your data.

Jon

We have never once had a hard drive fail. We use hard drives to back up all of our files. We use Western Digital Drives in a server case and 2.5" Hitachi / Segate Drives for our portable use. Slap them in a firewire case ($10 - $30) and you're set. Don't go pay for an "external" hard drive because they charge way too much for them. Make your own.