As i am getting on with the process of storing my mini dv tapes on to external drives the concern of how secure they are is of a little concern, i have started with a 1TB drive which will hold around half my 140 mini dv tapes i think, in retrospect 4 500gb drives may have been the way to go as no one knows how long hard drives last but as i have already stored 20 tapes thats that,20 of my 50 edited hdv tapes are stored on a separate drive, i just wondered if others share my concerns regarding video storage.

For my really important videos I use a 2TB Western Digital drive in RAID1. Should one drive fail, I replace it and loose nothing... of course even RAIDs can fail but there is a lot less chance for that (I heard of RAID controllers failing and messing up the data on both drives).

An even better solution is to mirror your data onto another drive and keep the two drives in two separate places

Yes in retrospect i should have gone that way, thanks for the input.

I think you should also keep the tapes - they'll probably outlast the hard disk copies

I think you should also keep the tapes - they'll probably outlast the hard disk copies

No worries Jim i will ,touch wood not one of my tapes [vhs,vhsc, svhs, svhsc, video 8 or dv- hdv has failed yet.

My Hi8 tapes have outlasted the deck.

If you're really in it for the long haul, keep your copies in separate locations. preferrably at two places that you know are secure, dry, and cool.

also keep devices able to read the media as well.

Who knows how long miniDV or even miniDV HD is going to last as a format.

Hard drives are great for their capacity, but only tape can handle shock without any care.