Safe Storage: Archiving Your Tapes and DVDs

Chances are, somewhere in your household – either in an attic, a closet, or bottom of a dresser drawer – there resides the pictorial history of your family. You trust it to remain safe there. While moths might nip at your old sweaters and time slowly yellow newspaper clippings, photos will remain more or less in tact through the years. Your modern day video albums may not be so safe. Digital storage may have plenty of boons, but did you know that the average shelf life of a MiniDV tape is only 10-15 years? DVD-R, the most common DVD media for camcorders, is only 5-15 years. That’s a good deal shorter than your grandparents Ellis Island photos. So how can you keep that data for the ages? Here are some tips.

Cool and Dry
Like pretty much everything that gets stored, tapes and DVDs like cool, dry places. Think about how you store wine and you’re on the right track. VHS and MiniDV tapes require an additional consideration. Tapes work on a principle of metal particles sticking to the tape. Magnetic fields, even low ones like stereo speakers and CRT (not LCD or plasma) televisions, strip those particles away over time. They degrade video quality, and eventually, they are destroyed.

DVDs have their own issues. A few years ago, it was cited that DVDs could be last for over a hundred years. Perhaps it was shady marketing, or perhaps they were confusing your camcorder’s blank DVDs with professionally manufactured Hollywood movie DVDs. Eventually, though, this estimate was knocked down to a far less optimistic estimate of 5-15 years. I read one observer that likened the process to steel degradation. It may look tough, but eventually it will succumb to rust.

MiniDV tapes are great for shooting and archiving, but they can decay, like all media.

Materials make the difference here, and so do the format types. Discs that use gold last the longest, then silver. Those made of composite or alloy materials degrade the fastest. In terms of DVD formats, one-time-use DVD+R and DVD-Rs have the longest shelf life. DVD+RWs, DVD-RWs, and DVD-RAMs, which are all multiple-use formats, degrade faster due to their design.

Gold discs last longer, but tend to cost more.

Overcoming the 15 Year Shelf Life
Unless you plan on scrapping and rewriting your family history every 10-15 years (who doesn’t, from time to time?), you probably want your video to last longer than the original media can sustain. For now, there only seems to be one remedy: migration.

When you get down to it, all your digital photos, video, and voice recordings are just binary data, millions of ones and zeros for a computer to decode. And anything that stores data can just as easily lose it. But unlike your old photographs, you can make as many copies as you like with virtually no degradation. To ensure the security of your digital memories, save it to several places. A hard copy or two stored in different locations as well as another copy or two on hard drives are smart choices. One-terabyte drives are increasingly common, and can accommodate a substantial amount of video. There are also services that store your data remotely, for a fee. Costs vary, but their cold, dry premises are ideal environments for storage.

Making sure your grandchildren see the video you shoot today means taking the steps to ensure its survival.