Home Video Archiving - Which media is best!?

So I'm going to post something different here, this will be a slightly technical post talking about the best archival method for future proofing your data!

When it comes to deciding what type of medium to use for archiving your data, no media offers a lifetime guarantee. Scientists can't guarantee the life span of optical disc, HDD, magnetic tape, flash or any other medium, I think simple because the medium hasn't been around that long to prove. The environment also dictates the life span of your archived medium.

I won't go into many specifics on which media is best to use and why, there's plenty of article online that compare the pros and cons. What I'm posting this blog for is to tell you regardless of what you use to archive your media, create PAR2 files! What PAR2 files allow you to do is have data redundancy. If a few sectors of your data is corrupted instead of not being able to view the data, you can repair it by using PAR2.

I don't think there's a best method on making your data redundant with PAR2 but the way I plan to make my data redundant is to create a 25% redundant PAR2 files for my data. I archive home videos and usually when I archive an entire tape, I put the contents all into a directory on my computer and burn to a Blu-ray. Some people will burn an optical disc then create an .ISO of the disc and base their PAR2 files on that. I'm sure this would work for you but I think it seems more logical to create your PAR2 files based on your directory of data (in my case 1 VHS tape) and then burn the PAR2 files to a separate disc. With this method, if a sector on your disc gets corrupted you'll be repairing an individual file and not an entire disc.

If you do experience a bad sector on your medium of choice you must first recover everything as possible with a program like ISOBuster or BadCopy. Once you can recover as much data as possible you can then run QuickPar to repair any files with corrupted sectors.

In my opinion this is the way to go in order to have more reliable archives of your precious videos or photos!

To read more visit LifeHacker!

http://lifehacker.com/5120266/burn-more-reliable-discs-with-quickpar/

Where was I...

So wow, it's been a super long time since posting a blog! I admit that I don't want to share anything too deep since I'd rather have people I meet in real life discover myself for themselves. Besides that though, here I am writing another blog!

My grandparents health is not well so I've been staying a night on the weekend to help out. Yesterday I was able to borrow some old family videos to capture and eventually write to DVD or Blu-ray. It's interesting how watching older videos can effect your opinion about people still in your life and where your life is heading.

I'm 30 years old now and I can look back on my life and see how quickly things have moved. In these videos my Grandparents are in their early 50s. All of my memories of them don't seem to have aged. I see them today in their 80s, frail and needing a lot of assistance and I wonder when did this happen? When did everything change? It literally seems like it creeped up and surprised me, I didn't see the gradual change and this is something video points out.

I'm afraid that another 30 years will slip by without me noticing. The lives we live now offer more convenience and time savings but we're over looking our lives. We don't get outside and do as much, we stay inside and sit on Facebook, our phones, watch TV, movies... we don't socialize with family, some family I didn't know existed...

I was thinking about technology compared to that of the 80s/90s. VHS tapes didn't offer the best of video quality but it offered a way to archive video. Just recently my friend lost every single photo and video of her 1 year old son due to these images being on her phone and getting deleted with a tap of a button. I'm converting videos from the 80s right now so I ask you, what technology is better? If Facebook was gone where would our relationships with people stand? If our power grid collapsed forget about people not knowing how to stay alive, people wouldn't know how to communicate. Sure people know how to talk but people in the next generation don't know the soft skills, the people skills, the personality to be-friend a person in real life. This simply friendliness is being lost. People only look out for themselves and they get off on destroying others. America's becoming corrupted and we don't even recognize it. We don't live in a modern society, we are just living in a time period, a period of people that are losing touch.

I release you...

All the lies that I've created, the false image I've shaped myself to be. I don't know how this mentality came to be but it has to end now. I never believed I was an attractive person, thought I was hideous and an unbearable sight to see, looking back on the photos of myself weighing around 210, I realize it's been a lie.

Something I have yet to discover is why I've created and have these lies looping in my mind 24/7. I didn't meet my weight loss goal for last year but the rest of my life is going to be different now. I refuse to live my life in the background, in the shadows, cowering in the dark. I'm my own worst enemy and if I can overcome myself I can overcome anything!

Here's to that bastard I've been living with, you're dead now! Here's looking toward the rest of my life! C|iii|     Cheers!