OT: backup your HD to DV cam!

TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/16/2004, 5:59 AM
Well, aparently this is for Mac only, but and macers out there could network their PC to their mac & use FTP to backup. :)
The Screen Savers had info about this last night. You need a fireire port on your mac, one on your DV camera, a DV tape (and type of recorder/camera that in/outputs via firewire to any kind of DV tape!), and a $45 program!

Check out the details here:
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/macintosh/story/0,24330,3670234,00.html

hope it helps someone!

Comments

farss wrote on 4/16/2004, 6:50 AM
Software to do that has been around for some time for PCs. But it' didn't fool anyone that I know of. When you do the sums it just hasn't got legs, maybe they figure Mac users are a bit more gullible.

A MiniDV tape holds around 12 GByte of data but if you were writing backup data you'd want more error correction than plain DV25 has, so lets say it holds 10GB. Now a 200 GB dirve over here costs around $200 and a MiniDV tape $10 but I'd need 20 of them to hold the same amount of data as the drive so the costs is about the same, maybe give or take a bit.
BUT shock, horror, do you fancy having to swap 20 tape in and out of your DV deck to backup the drive, and that's to say nothing of the head wear on the deck. You could use large format DV tapes in say a DSR-11 but the cost per GByte just went up and so did the value of the heads.
So backing up to another drive costs the about same and is one hell of a lot faster. If you're really paranoid about not loosing data RAID 1 or RAID 5 is a much better idea than this. A cheaper but less convenient solution are drive caddies.
We went through the same exercise backing up to DVDs but again per GB they're more expensive than HDs.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/16/2004, 8:10 AM
Acording to the mac website they can get 45gb on a mini DV tape. With some error correction they get ~30. Maybe they have a special compression scheme that give you more data. For backuping up a fresh OS install w/software it wouldn't be a bad idea.
riredale wrote on 4/16/2004, 8:30 AM
I'd say that sounds about right. If you run at LP speed, a miniDV tape holds about 20GB (90 minutes of DV material is about 20GB). If you use lossless compression, you can pretty much double that. But a single dropout and you're screwed, so you throw in some robust redundancy and you're back down to 30GB.

Still, here at the local Fry's you get 200GB of hard drive for $100. Throw in the same lossless compression and you're talking 400GB for $100. And no dropouts.