Best Storage for HD Films

Bluebook · 16 Aug 2013 at 12:51

What is the best way for long term storage of films that I have the majority in .mkv format?

I want to be safe knowing they will be ok stored and won't degrade.

Portable Ext. Hardrives might seem best value but may be unreliable if not used often and may not work 3-5 years? (this is how I currently store them)

Disks/DVD's seem a more reliable method but unable to store much on and would take up more space.

Any ideas? Is there any reliable media that can be guranteed to work in years to come?

wazza300 · 16 Aug 2013 at 12:54

just a regular internal hdd 2 to 3tb

you can buy a 5.25" hdd internal dock(one that fits the pc case same way as your dvd drive)

then you can plug in/out the hdd as and when needed ect

Ethermaster · 16 Aug 2013 at 12:57

You could alway get yourself a NAS unit and steam the file via your network on to your HD playback device i.e computer, S.M.A.R.T HD TV and some Blue-ray players, I have see some very old P4's used for a server like this (with a second hand LSI raid card that supports RAID 5) and using raid 5 you will not see and drop in performance and have the ability for a HDD to die without losing any of the data on the raid array then you can just pop in another a replacement HDD and rebuild the raid array so your safe net is restored.

The only problem with this that you will need to buy a few HDD

Bluebook · 19 Aug 2013 at 08:23

thanks guys, you have given me something to think about !

JonJ678 · 19 Aug 2013 at 09:26

Data tends to degrade over time. The risk is higher then the files are being read or copied, but it's possible at other times. Radiation tends to be blamed, or slightly faulty drives.

The options there are to let the files rot, and hope it doesn't matter too much. That's a pretty good choice.

Or to adopt one of a range of increasingly paranoid redundancy and checksumming systems. An acceptable and low effort, but not perfect, version is found in the zfs file system, where a raid 1 can repair damaged files provided one drive still has a good copy. It detects corruption upon read or when told to look for it. This works well for a zero thought, runs in the background option.