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DV tapes

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ToiletDuck

Member
Joined
Aug 17, 2002
Ok i work for ABC as an editor and i work with the DV format. I believe the tapes are 25mbps. Now I have a question. If the tapes are digital. If the tapes have timecodes on them. Which they are and do. Then could I use them as a storage backup? Because if so that would equal about 99,000mb on a 66 minute tape. And if you could put 99 gigs on one tape that has a time code, could you store files on it and then access them off the tape? I mean didn't the old government computers use to run all their data strait off the tape?
Duck
 
I heard about the possibility of doing this before, but when i looked into it a bit more it ended up not seeming like such a good idea. Basically the tapes used for digital video are not as high quality as the ones used for data. This is because if a few bits get mixed up on the video tape, a few pixels may not appear correctly in a frame, or a barely noticable audio artifact may pop, but scramble the same bits on a data tape, and the programs won't run, documents get corrupted, etc. It also seems that getting the equipment for this is about as expensive as getting the equipment for an actual tape backup drive, so it doesn't really save money either.
 
Also, you have to worry about the number of passes. Most storage tapes have something like a 100,000 pass lifetime, which is aprox. equal to 10,000 reads and writes. DV tapes probably aren't made for that much stress, or have a smaller archival lifetime.

As for reading and writing off of them on the fly, it will be fairly laggy with any tape system, and if you read the same files enough times, you'll wear out the tape prematurely. Best thing for tapes is to do backups to them.
 
Well I have a DV camera that can record on the tapes. So i figured for $30 or $25 for 99 gigs would be cool to store my media onto.
 
that would be a nice storage option. just think...tape some stuff, download mp3s onto it, backup your system. oh well, theres always something better...
 
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