Speed is the issue with backing up as data to DV. Its going to take an hour for every 17 gigs. It also locks you into a proprietary system for dumping and recovering. Another minus: DV tapes are relatively fragile and definitely not archival. For data backup I'd give them a three year life at maximum.
Drive space is cheap these days. Most people I know are just dedicating external drives for video backup. You can buy an external 1 TB MyBook with firewire, esata AND usb2 for $150 - that's the cost or 50 low end DV tapes, making the drive about the same cost per gig (cheaper if you aren't compressing the tape backups). .Also not archival - all drives fail (EVERYTHING fails), but easier to manage a few large capacity drives than boatloads of tape for cloning/refreshing every few years. And much much much much faster. Brook _______________________________________________________ Brook Hinton film/video/audio art www.brookhinton.com studio vlog/blog: www.brookhinton.com/temporalab [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
