Survey - how many of us still shooting on tape?

[Boyd Ostroff]

Originally Posted by Derek Heeps

Most of the tapes , of jobs done for other people , don't have any personal meaning to me

Transferring 400 tapes onto one drive strikes me as putting all your eggs in one basket : if that drive goes blotto , you've lost the lot

I agree, there is no point in capturing tapes that you don't care about.

Yes, I also have some concerns about losing a 5TB drive full of video, but of course that's why I have a backup on an identical drive. I use Carbon Copy Cloner on the Mac, and it can incrementally update a clone, which makes it easy. As the drive gets fuller and time passes, I intend to add more backup copies. Have got two milk crate full of drives going back to about 2001, and really have not lost all the much on them. Recently I cloned them all to another 5TB drive (with a backup).

I have about 600 movies and 600 TV shows ripped from my DVD collection on my iTunes server also. I use a 3TB drive for the library there, and rotate two additional 3TB drives for backups (automatically executed every night). And of course I still have all the original DVD's as well.

IMO, "data is data", it doesn't matter where a drive contains 400 tapes, 50,000 MS Word files, or just one satellite image of the entire US. I don't see why the same backup strategy wouldn't work for all of these. The more valuable the data, do more backups and have more offsite locations.

[Dave Barnes]

More than I would have thought still like tape :)

I have to agree with most replies... I feel tape is my only true reliable archive... I have tapes including S-VHS, Hi8, 3/4" , Beta SP, Digi Beta , DV, DVCAM, HDV, and even some HDCAM in the collection of the last 25 years, all projects that I have shot or mastered that are worth saving for me. I have lost a few hard disks over the years that were NOT backed up, but I still have the source DV / HDV tapes if / when I need them.

[Harry Pallenberg]

SD cards are cheap enough that I can just add them to the budget for most of my projects and just keep them as masters.