I wasn’t making any assumptions about your setup, just trying to be helpful. I’m sorry if I didn’t adequately convey my intentions.
hard crashes are rare but having the drive electronics die is pretty common. I buy at least a half dozen drives per year on average. I’m using 2T drives now with well over a dozen 500gig drives in various enclosures. Failure rates are still low but in no way rare or unheard of.
I would assume that continuous backup software would run at low priority and therefore would not interfere with normal operations. do you know for a fact that is not the case?
I haven’t thoroughly investigated continuous backup software, but I’m extremely sensitive to tasks running during my real-time operations. If even a single frame is dropped during video transfer, I may have to start over again and lose an hour or more. So I can’t have anti-virus, disc burning or other maintenance routines running at the same time just to be safe. I’ve even found out that plugging in a USB device during a transfer causes lost frames while the device is being registered, even tho you would think that would be benign.
And since many non-real-time ops use the CPU 100%, any background op would have an effect, however minimal, and make me wait longer for things to get done.
So I am apparently the only person in history who has taken a bunch of x264 .mkv files and burned a Blu-Ray disc which will play in standalone players. It’s a tedious process, especially when I had to figure out most of the steps myself, but it CAN be done.
Musicat, just out of curiosity, how do you have 18TB of data??? I thought that my 6TB TOTAL was a lot. I know that 720x480 DV video is about 13GB/hour…not quite sure what the “almost lossless” 1080p equivalent would be, but I’m guessing that’s what it is?
If the MKV is under 7.95 GB, I’ll convert it to AVCHD and burn to DVD-DL. If it’s more, I’ll convert to Blu-ray format and burn it to a BD-R and of course try to put other videos on there to make the most of my 25 GB of space.
Well, I used to put divx rips on DVD’s that worked in most standalone players, but I’ve since decided that it’s easier to just keep buying larger and larger hard drives.
AVI files are indeed about 13GB/hr, which is why I switched to MPG when the storage shrank too fast. MPG at 8Gb/sec takes about 2GB/hr.
In the summer, I record around 10 hours a week plus supplementary material for our TV station. I have to store the originals, edit work, and final files in 3 formats (MPG, DVD and WMV) along with some audio files. Then I download about 10 hours of broadcast-quality video from other TV stations for our use per week and since we pay only for the download costs and most are perpetually useful, I store those, too.
And that’s not to mention complete backups, which I don’t have at present, only partial.
It all adds up pretty fast. Thank goodness 1.5TB drives are now under $100. The motherboard on my main computer can address 6 internally and any number externally thru USB ports. The rest are attached as needed; a true NAS system is beyond our budget.
Not into HD yet, but I shudder to think of what that will be like storage-wise.
Those sorts of issues is why there is no substitute for an HTPC. If you only need to do such conversions rarely, then I guess it’s not so painful. But if you watch a lot of dl’ed video like anime or foreign tv shows or whatever, it gets tiring.
I first tried to get by with a media player but invariably there would be some file formats it couldn’t handle or certain flavors of some formats. I finally said screw it and just set up a standard mid-tower box behind the AV rack. Done and done.
If the input video (MKV) is exactly 1920 x 1080, it’ll work out perfectly. But if it’s, say 1920 x 900, I use uncropMKV to first add the black bars to get it to 1920x1080.
Update - single layer blurays have now passed below the $1/disc mark. Newegg’s got a pack of 25 selling for $19.99 with free shipping!
I’ve got enough stuff backed up (stuff that was just sitting there taking space - HD videos mostly) that I can now pull out my 500 and 1.5TB 7200 drives and unbox these two 10,000 velociraptors which I recently got from work and get a RAID going!
BTW - I have yet to have ANY read failures at all with BD media. These things really ARE indestructible!
Update…I have replaced all my active 1.5TB hard drives with 2TB ones and delegated the 1.5’s to backup only. Prices for HD bare drives are about half of last year this time, although the Japan disaster may halt the price decrease trend for a while.
I haven’t given the Blu-Ray situation much thought recently. I still think the technology will quickly fade and never attain the dominance that CD/DVDs did for backup.
