[ILUG] OT video archiving

[Ronan Cunniffe]

On Sat, 27 Aug 2005, Frank Duignan wrote:

> We bought a digital video camera a year ago and I find that the volume of
> data from it is becoming unwieldy.  The camera produces AVI files that are huge
> approx 13GB / hour.  Compressing to DVD reduces this down to about 3-4GB.
> Two questions:
> 1) Is it worth preserving the AVI's for that extra bit of data they
> might contain?

I'll skip this one 'cos other people know more...
> 2) Any suggestions for archiving all this stuff for > 10 years?  I
> suspect that this will be best achived by rolling across ever larger
> disk drives over time but maybe there's a better approach.

You'd suspect right.  No computer storage technology is engineered with
this in mind.  You might get lucky with a particular batch of DVDs, but it
would be a pain finding out different in 10 years...

Step 1: Checksums
Step 2: Multiple copies (RAID 1 probably doesn't count here!)
Step 3: Periodically (i.e. cron job) scan and compare.

I use tripwire (the relevant tweaking is easy enough - edit
/etc/tripwire/twpol.txt) for Step 1 and Step 3, and keep copies on two
separate machines for Step 2.

Since in your case, access is (probably) infrequent, if you're storing on
disks that aren't used for anything else, making sure the drives are set
to spin down when not in use is probably a good idea.  Write a script with
hdparm -y if the drives won't go to sleep on their own.

HTH

Ronan