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Can You Back Up Data On Audio/Visual Media? 212

Posted by Cliff from the cheap-digita-storage dept.
O enrique asks: "Since digital video is becoming a popular issue, I wonder when would we put in practice the possibility to do file backup (non audiovisual data storage) into digital tapes using those firewire enabled cameras. Each 1 hour tape (less than 10$) stores more than 10 Gbytes of data! As far as I know, nowadays Linux is only able to grab data from such devices, but not to store into them. Well, it seems that some people already thought about it, but I've seen nothing complete. See the Web pages here and here. Is someone else interested on it?"
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Can You Back Up Data on Audio/Visual Media? More

Can You Back Up Data on Audio/Visual Media?

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  • Wow! (Score:1)

    by morie ( 227571 )
    So now I could view all of my data in just 1 hr! Some movie, huh!
  • ....why not just buy a lot of scotch tape [slashdot.org]? Wouldn't that be even cheaper than getting a DV Cam?

    On the up side, this would be a nifty hack, if it will work. Now, the only remaining thing to do is to get that there mp3 player thingee to read these cards.

  • Could be made to work (Score:4)

    by JCMay ( 158033 ) <JeffMayNO@SPAMearthlink.net> on Tuesday December 12, 2000 @04:16AM (#565321) Homepage
    I remember a while back there used to be a system that pressed a standard VCR into service as a backup system. The data was recorded as a black and white pattern in the video, and that was recorded on the tape. A special cable was attached to the serial port and the data could then be retrieved. At least that's how the Amiga version worked :) I'm sure it would be possible to make it work; the question would be at what cost (would new hardware be required? Those cameras I don't think were made to accept video from their USB ports, were they?), and the effort involved (Spend a fortune to save a nickel?) Jeff Jeff

  • Yes. (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    I believe my C64 could do this.

    Or you could record an actual modem, like Information Society did.

    But if you were sane, you'd just buy backup tapes instead. Or for that matter, use RAID-5.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Wow, what a sense of deja vu (Score:3)

    by alumshubby ( 5517 ) on Tuesday December 12, 2000 @04:18AM (#565323)
    Anybody else here remember using a tape recorder to upload/download software onto a PET, TRS-80, or an Apple II? And when you were loading a program, sometimes you weren't quite sure if the loading sequence had worked until it got to the end and you entered RUN.

  • That would be SOOO cool, but does a digital camera guarantee the storage of each and every bit? I mean, for a home video of my infant daughter burping milk all over her mother or something it hardly matters if a few bits (pixels) get dumped, but for most files this would be a total disaster. A comprehensive error-checking and correcting facility would have to be employed for this to have any use, IMHO. The idea was employed a while back with VHS tapes, but failed because of the high error rates...

  • There are linux utils for working with firewire - specifically to a mini-DV device. Why can't we just change what we send the writing tool data out of tar or cpio?

    FIND IT [maplesearch.com]
  • It's too early :( Signing three times like that! Need to snooze!
  • I seem to remember that there was a product out long ago that allowed one to use a VCR to save data to a standard VHS tape. And then there was my old Timex Sinclair and it's audio tape data storage system.

    My concern with this method of storage is that of the reliability of the media. Since the tape is wrapped around itself on the spool, it tends to interfere with itself over time. I've seen this happen with regular recorded television programs on tapes losing clarity over time. It just seems to convoluted of a plan to store data. It'd be to unreliable for a corporate environment, which would prefer better systems, and slightly too expensive (if you don't have a camera and firewire connection) and complicated for home use.

  • http://www.ajwm.net/backfire/ The server has detected that you are using a browser that is incompatible with Internet standards (probably Microsoft Internet Explorer). The server is programmed to deny requests from such browsers.

  • Most modern DV-cams have a FireWire connector for input/output. These would fit nicely with a FireWire adapter on your PC (or Mac - the newer ones have FireWire already, don't they?). Anyway, a FireWire adapter and cable can't be all that expensive...

  • I've backed up a couple of times to CDRW, but haven't found a way that is convenient or easy to restore. Recommendations anyone?
  • A long time ago, I was at Greenbrier's Radio observitory and saw a VCR sitting in a rack. I asked what it was doing, and the guy replied that it was for recording data from the scope.
    "Hm?" I said.
    It turns out that they had sitting in the back of some 286 PC a card which would output digital signal over RCA cables and feed them to a VCR, which they would then mail the tape to Califoria. Damn cheap too.
    Now why hasn't anyone out there made a standard 'backup' device akin to a VCR or Super 8 is beyond me.
  • I've seen people working on this (not on a *nix platform, just the concept in general).. unfortunately I seem to recall the built in error correction in all the dv devices screws you up. Since its expected video data, you basically end up reading a whole bunch of "Bad data" off the tape (as far as the device is concerned) and it screws you over.

    One alternative would be to encode the data inside a d-1 format video and write it to tape that way, but then you're not accomplishing a whole lot over using VHS or just buying a darn tape backup. Heh.
  • I was just thinking about that. I had a Radio Shack CoCo (color computer - The original w/ Chicklet keyboard) Came with 4k Had it upgraded to 16k.. Think we paid $800 for it.. When I was saving programs I would save them to two different Cassete Players, and three different tapes since I never knew if I was going to get my data back again or not. What a bummer it was when I spent all night coding, saved it, and it was lost to the Bit Bucket.

    -Jason
  • There was such a system on sale at my local Tempo a few months ago. I really can't remember the details, because I only looked at it for a few seconds.

    It wasn't very expensive: maybe 60 pounds. And it produced "reasonable" storage requirements: about 1 Gig onto 1 hour of video tape.

    The problem was that it used a normal video recorder. So using it to backup my current storage would only require 9 tapes, which isn't too bad. But it would take 36 hours to read or write those tapes...

    So I left it alone.
    --
    Too stupid to live.
  • There is another Linux util for working with FireWire....Macintosh G3 (B+W - later model) or G4 + LinuxPPC ;-)

    ----------------------------
  • Digital video isn't like analog. You have to have all of the data to play the data back or you start getting digital remnants. Because of how the DV compression format works, it doesn't take much missing data to start getting tiling and just a little more to get stuttering and then a complete failure of playback. I agree that there is data loss in a DV cam, but it is all before the compression stage. After that the write and read must be almost perfect to eliminate quality problems.
  • Several years ago there was a gizmo that could plug into a computers serial(?) port and dump data to a VCR. It never caught on, but if you could find one, I bet it would be a good place to start.

    Wish I could even remember the name of the package . . .

  • A long time ago, I was at Greenbrier's Radio observitory and saw a VCR sitting in a rack. I asked what it was doing, and the guy replied that it was for recording data from the scope. "Hm?" I said. It turns out that they had sitting in the back of some 286 PC a card which would output digital signal over RCA cables and feed them to a VCR, which they would then mail the tape to Califoria. Damn cheap too. Now why hasn't anyone out there made a standard 'backup' device akin to a VCR or Super 8 is beyond me.

    There was actually a commercial backup program based on this hardware, circa 1987 or so. I'm not turning up any links, but it was pretty much a composite video adapter for your CGA card plus an adapter which could read the mad strobings resulting. It would let you back up your entire hard drive assuming:

    • Your hard drive was &lt 6hrs long - about 40 megs
    • You trusted VHS tapes enough to do the job.
    Under 7 megs an hour? *shudder* That makes a bloody parallel port Zip drive look like greased lightning.

    I assume Lotus, with their bloody copy-protection schemes of the day, must have had Macrovision in Lotus 1-2-3.

  • Re:Wow, what a sense of deja vu (Score:4)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Tuesday December 12, 2000 @04:37AM (#565340) Homepage
    Why yes - you only have to type a game into an Atari once before realizing, "Damn, I need to get a mass storage device".

    Next question: Anyone ever seen a vinyl record with software on it? I remember a few ads for records that you could feed into an audio in jack (where the cassette normally goes) - sure would like to find one of those. (they were not for Atari tho - some other format that could use a std. el-cheapo audio cassette deck - Atari used their own special tape deck.)
  • There was standard backup devices that used VHS.
    At least I remeber having seen ads for devices that would save computer data onto VHS tapes. You could even use your regular video for it. I think it was just a cable from your computer to the video, and a card to transform the data.

    ion++

  • 8mm (Score:1)

    by suss ( 158993 )
    My old Exabyte 8200 [exabyte.com] uses standard 8mm video tapes which will fit 2.5GB. There's actually a sony 8mm mechanism in there very similar to what they used in camcorders...
  • And everytime it comes up, it usually comes down to this:

    FireWire is just a transport medium that can send data to a camera to put on the tape. That data follows a certain format, so you would have to put the timecode and other required fields in there, and then where the image data normally is, somehow put your data in there, as if it is already compressed DV data. Of course, it'd also be handy to have something that'll read it back off as well.

    You'd probably be better off if someone designed a tape drive that used the miniDV tapes to hold the data, like the 8mm drives - it's a video, it's a data backup!

  • VHS backup (Score:4)

    by njet ( 189864 ) on Tuesday December 12, 2000 @04:42AM (#565344) Homepage
    Check this [iu.edu] and this [hotmail.ru]

  • I got a Sony DCR-TVR315 NTSC [epinions.com] and it's specified in the owner's manual that we can't do this. They don't say why...

    Maibe because it's written on normal 8 mm tape and this is becomes a lossy format after a couple of years.

    GFK's
  • Not me -- I was an Exatron Stringy Floppy [webweavers.co.nz] man!
  • If you're serious enough to back up your data in the first place, would you trust the integrity of a hack to write to a digital camera ?

    The data rate's not even appealing : A Sony AIT2 backs up to 25Gb (uncompressed), 50Gb (compressed) at 12Mb/s. That's enough for your home user. In a pro enviroment, Sony DTF2 gives you 200Gb uncompressed at 24Mb/s.

  • I'd be nervous. (Score:5)

    by Snowfox ( 34467 ) <snowfox@NOsPaM.snowfox.net> on Tuesday December 12, 2000 @04:48AM (#565348) Homepage

    Early on, many discovered that they could use DAT audio tapes in their DAT backups with just a few modifications.

    A little later on, many discovered that DAT audio tapes had nothing like the quality of DAT backups. One bit in a million is an acceptable error rate for an audio DAT. Even with matrix row/column checksumming and similar space-eating data safeguarding schemes, one bit in a million can be disasterous.

    If these video cameras follow the model of digital music devices, they are going to be quite forgiving of errors in the media. It's easy to fudge a few bits here and there when you only need to be accurate enough to fool a human ear through a couple thousandths of a second, or a human eye for 1/60th.

    I'll be wary of this until someone can verify that a situation similar to that of DATs doesn't exist here.

  • Tape backup devices? Hello??

    I mean, magnetic storage is around here for quite a long time.

    There were the Sinclair Spectrum, the C64 and others that used ordinary audio cassettes, using quite an interesting method - some kind of modem that is.

    The same way, there was that Amiga to VCR thing, I also remember reading about it sometime during 1993 or 94.

    So aren't we over-hyping digital tape recording. Of course there are some nice new toys like the Thomson D-VHS VCR or Sony Digital 8 (digital recording on 8mm tape - at twice its normal speed), but recording digital on analog magnetic media has been around since before I was born.

    Now, about that anti-IE website. I think it takes a lot of nerve. Webstandards? -=Iframe=- is a web standard. Where is it in Netscape4? And what about the extreme confusion Mozilla represents for webdesigners? As one, I play by numbers. My server logs show a 55% IE4 and higher share (and I think that's quite low if you take all of the web), so IE must be my priority when designing webpages, unless I don't want my pages to be seen by as many visitors as possible. As I do want them to be seen, designing for IE has been a priority roughly since Windows98 and its bundled IE4 came out, and I am nicely surprised how IE evolves smoothly and (no one can deny it) how MSDN documentation almost rules as much as OReilly's *grin. But what about Netscape? In some high-tech websites where I needed split IE4 and NS4 versions, nothing, not even the NS4 version, works with Mozilla.6. That's just impossible.

    Webstandards? Then everyone use Amaya! Else, the public is the only standard to go for.

    Cheers,

    | e.s.
  • I do that too (under Windows) and it is the best backup I've ever owned. But my drive lets me use it like a standard drive, so I can just drag files onto it as I wish. I don't think such convenience exists under Linux.

  • I agree that there is data loss in a DV cam, but it is all before the compression stage.

    What kind of compression is this? If it's lossy (most video compression schemes are) then it most certainly will not work with computer files. Imagine encoding the Emacs binary with MPEG-4 and then decode it - would most assuredly NOT run.

  • I use my DC280 camera with the 48MB flashcard as a floppy disk to take stuff from work to home and vice versa, using the USB connector. But that flashcard stores the data as actual bits (in fact, compactflash is ATA media).

    With the tape camera, the error correction will kill you. You're better (and much cheaper) off with just tapestreamer or CDR. Takes less CPU too.
  • My first Unix experience was with SCO running on a network (UUCP) of '286 machines. The admin used a card that connected to a VCR for backups.

    It sort of worked, but was very unreliable.

    I suspect that the meia would be fine, but VCR's aren't really designed for data.

  • 8mm digital tapes & Sony TRV-203 (Score:4)

    by Ummite ( 195748 ) on Tuesday December 12, 2000 @04:54AM (#565354)
    Hello folks

    My friend and I already though about that. Since it's very easy to do on Windows, we tought it would be a great way to do backup and/or exchange huge files. The simple idea was to do a big .zip, rename it to .avi and then store it on the cam, and vice-versa.

    The problem is to retrieve only a part. Even if it's theorically possible to go to a precise frame and then, do a kind of "fat" which we could store at the first frame or first second, since the data on cd-rom is becoming .30$ / 700 megs, doing parts would render the idea of one big 10 gig file useless for all the troubles.

    The data rate for an AVI-DV is approx 3.5 Megs/sec, allowing 12.6 gig of total space.

    I think seriously that such a way to backup should really remain for hack purpose, because dvd writer becoming available for normal people probably in 2002. The price of dvd-r will probably drop a lot then (as cd first were 3$ each, now less than 1/10 of it's original price), it will make that hack useless.

    But eh, I'll try it tonight
  • D1 for example and another specific to government work. Both can record audio/video as well as data. As a video editor it's great because you can backup your media as well as your data as quick as lightning.

    But if you want to spend slightly less than a hundred grand on a tape format that is essentially dead, you'll want something else.

    DVC-PRO is becomming pupular (translation: cheap) in spite of its inferior compression algorhythm (read: flaimbait) it would be a nice candidate for such a solution.

    i am such a ho [ridiculopathy.com]

  • Has anyone tried an 8 Track? I wonder how much data those would store. You could use it to back up just the last X minutes of something, and it would loop forever. It might be easier if someone made a store/retrieve that used the input/output of a soundcard, so you use any audio recording device.
  • This has absolutely nothing to do with DEC.

    Get a clue.

  • You could use one of those tapes people use to plug portable CD players into tape decks.

    I'm suddenly reminded of the time I wanted to store a huge load of stuff on a CDR and use a portable CD player as a CD-ROM for my old TRS-80 CoCo 3.

    Then I realised I would have probably had to wire up the pause button into a "rem" jack. I'd probably need some logic, too. (send a pulse whenever the state changed)

    Come to think of it, I still have my old official Tandy tape "drive" in front of me on my desk at work. Some time after it died, I built a 12V power supply into it. I now have a 12V Nokia phone charger hooked up to it. It charges from nothing in 5 minutes flat, much faster than the wall-wart ones they give you with the phones. People charge their phones at my desk all the time. I'll often come in in the morning and a phone will be there.

    Ok, I'll stop my sorta-OT drivel.
  • Yup. I remember using a tape recorder to upload/download software on my TRS-80 Color computer. Still have all 3 models. I still have my documentation for OS-9 level II, and a HUGE collection of the Rainbow magazine.

    If we could harness the storage capcity of such devices with FIREWIRE and/or USB, it would be great. We could store all our legal MP3s on one of these!
  • I used to use my old Atari 400 to store progs on a modified cassette player.
  • What is even more amazing is that this is the kind of bog-standard HTML that any web browser can handle, I can't see anything here that IE would have any trouble with. I think that with a pencil, and a copy of the W3 guidelines, my grandmother would provide a sufficient rendering engine. This is incredibly annoying,.
  • I have an attachment for one of my old ataris (maybe even the computer based one) that read data off an audio cassette. The only game I ever found for it was some geographical or world history thing or something. Can't find the thing right now, probably is next to my E.T. cart :P
  • Well I'm sure there is just one of those nice little drop downs for story posting and it probably just says Digital. And the poster probably knows little to nothing about Digital E.Q. which to my knowledge is still owned by Compaq and not "dead" as a previous poster was pointing out. They may not be making alphas any more but they could decide to start back up at any moment which makes them not dead, dormant maybe.
  • Strictly speaking, this article should not be under the Digial category, but something more general purpose. When people say digital, they're talking about the company DEC (COMPAQ), and not digital media. Well, it could have been worse. I'm surprised it wasn't spelled "degital" or something. Peace out.
    ------------
    a funny comment: 1 karma
    an insightful comment: 1 karma
    a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
  • dude, that is not a very reliable way to back up. CD-R's really weren't designed to do single file writes. Try taking that CD to another computer (one that's not running Adaptec directCD) and see if it reads it. Most likely it won't.

    There's a reason it doesn't work like that under linux--it's not worth the trouble when your backed up data disappears all of a sudden.

    But hey, it's your data, do what you want with it. YMMV.

  • Hey guys, it's great to see someone in the tech community putting the earth first for once.
    Our landfills [devnull] have become clogged with decaying gifs of extinct corporate logos, and with the dotcom collapse, it's gettig worse. Combine this with the depletion of our natural swoosh reserves by short sighted marketers, and a crisis becomes imminent.
    That's why it's good to see you lot reusing the digital logo.
    For you young fellows out there, digital used to be the second largest computer manufacturer in the world.
    --Shoeboy
  • The gadget in question was called the Corvus Mirror.

  • Re:Yes. (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    Well, they're pretty different. But fault-tolerance is most of what I want in a backup. If I had that, then I'd only backup the really important stuff.

    Also, tape access is really slooow. I'd back up onto actual hard drives before I'd back anything up onto VHS...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • http://www.anonymizer.org/surf_encoded/http://www. ajwm.net/backfire/

    use anonymizer to hide your browser

    ---
  • They may not be making alphas any more but they could decide to start back up at any moment.
    Apparently. [compaq.com]
    --Shoeboy
  • A friend of mine had one of those VCR-backup programs. It was a bad idea. We discovered, through trial and error, that you had to use a brand-new High Quality tape every time you wanted to back up. No recycling your old tapes. If you didn't use a brand new High Quality (no $3 tapes here, either), the error rate was so high that you couldn't retrieve anything. What good is a backup that you can't restore from?

    While one VHS tape is cheaper than one Travan or 8mm or DLT or whatever, those other tapes are reusable for some time, having to buy a new VHS tape for every day (or week or however often you backup) added up to far more cost than using a regular tape drive, and the VCR backup/restore process was incredibly slow, so there was no upside other than initial cost (everybody has a VCR, right?).

  • UDF filesystem support is in 2.4.0-test11 right now and it even works :| It's pretty cool, but I'm not sure if I'd trust my backups to DirectCD. Since CDs are so cheap now, you're better off just cutting your losses and burning a CD-R once a month of your important data, then chucking the old CD in the trash can. This way, your CD-R backup will work in 99% of the CD-ROMs out there, instead of just working with multiread CD-ROM drives.

    I believe there is also a limit to the number of times you can burn to a CD-RW before the disk becomes unusable (1000 maybe?).
  • Ahh... wouldn't that be wonderful. 320Mb of MP3 insted of using expensive flash cards we could use cheap discs.

    Colin

  • I seem to remember that someone made a device that encoded digital audio as an analog signal for recording onto a VCR (probably the same type of scheme used for putting data on there as well), turning it into a pre-DAT digital audio device. I remember reading about this system in an article on the gear Deadheads used for taping shows.

    This place [alesis.com] sells a complete deck for doing this, but looks to be more specialized (ie, it just uses the media rather than a standard VHS deck).
  • you can get 10GB of audio visual data OK.
    But that's because the occasional bit error
    is tolerable here. To get the required bit
    error rate to required levels for "other"
    data, you have to use a much larger resolution
    on the tape.

    Emm, don't you think the tape drive manafacturers
    are already getting the best possible capacity?
  • "But if you were sane, you'd just buy backup tapes instead. Or for that matter, use RAID-5."

    RAID by itself is no substitute for backups. Sure, it protects against the failure of a disk, but what about other sorts of disasters, like bad RAID controller firmware, fire, flood, filesystem corruption, hostile intrusion, and so on?


    Of course, there are still the biggest use of backups: user carelessness.


    Of course, with the falling price of IDE drives, I have been thinking that it might be possible to build some IDE-RAID-based storage system that would rival tape libraries in cost/terabyte, but be much faster. (Maybe this is what you meant.) You could still make tapes for offsites and archives and such. Unfortunately, all the commercial products out there that do something like IDE RAID -> SCSI (which one might need to keep things simple) are way more expensive than their components would seem to justify, and I have no money, so it remains a pipe dream.


    I suppose you could just get tons of pentium systems doing software RAID and NFS.... hmmmm.... this sounds like a job for those folks at NASA who brought us Beowulf (and all the "imagine a Beowulf cluster of [ ]" on Slashdot.

  • My first job after leaving college was looking after all the computers in an office of about 20 people. All the companies central and main systems ran on an "Alpha Micro" machine which yielded one page on the internet entitled "Obsolete Hardware". Most of the software for the machine was on tape (Exabyte) but some (which I never had to use) was on videotape. One day a new TV and video arrived in the building and guess what the only videos in the building were....So as soon as we tuned in the video we were looking at a black and white spaced table of I think 16x16 blocks at a rate of at most 4 blocks a second.....a grand total of 128kb/sec!

    A simple demonstartion however of how this sort of a method with a firewire camera could certainly be used....it's just a question of what data-rate you can get!

  • The compression on DV is basically colorspace reduction. It is a loseless format and not an mpeg style affair. It is good enough for most things, the only problm being the area of broadcast TV where the lack of depth is quite apparent and it would really be a station dependant decision as to whether the piece was worth it. You can certainly use a DV camera for data-backup, the question is how much error correction would be required to ensure data security and what data rate would that leave?
  • They don't like Lynx either, the scum
  • If you're willing to experiment with using the wrong tool for the job, why not take a shot using the right, but used, tool? With a little bit of looking, you can find things like a 7/14GB tape drive [ebay.com] for far less than a DV camera.

  • Defective Browser:

    Access denied: incompatible browser.

    Ironically, should be inside .. so the *page* is incompatible with Internet standards. Meanwhile, IE continues to be more standards compliant than Netscape, which is recommended. Seriously, this is one of the lamest things I've seen in a long time. I mean, I have Netscape 4.76, IE 5.5 and a two day old Mozilla nightly build but I won't use any other browser than IE for recreational surfing because there is just no contest in terms of speed and stability. I don't think I've *EVER* seen my IE 5.5 crash and I've used it for months now.

    If Mozilla would fix some of the REALLY bad bugs it has (such as considering form fields with display: none as "non successful" (check the HTML 4 specs), being unable to properly refresh DHTML pages, using native scrollbars in XUL widgets (combo boxes), taking a window 3 seconds to open, losing bookmark names when copy & pasting, etc.) and if Mozilla would get fast enough to actually be usable, I'd love to switch. Until then, I'll stick with the #1 browser out there.

    Opera has a lot of potential too and I'm looking forward to their next major release but the current version has too many layout and JavaScript implementation bugs to be usable.

    Netscape 4.. There's no point in even mentioning the ways it sucks and is non-standards compliant but for the sake of the argument, let's mention IFRAME's, DOM, 85% of the CSS1 standard missing in the implementation, *horrible* table rendering performance and correctness, form widgets being native and thus not z-orderable, Java VM being barely 1.0.2 compatible with a buggy 1.1 AWT implementation... Like I said.. it sucks in too many ways to even mention.

  • internet standards; partial repost (Score:3)

    by macpeep ( 36699 ) on Tuesday December 12, 2000 @05:45AM (#565396)
    I should have used "preview" on my previous post...

    <html>
    <title>Defective Browser:</title>
    <body><h1>Access denied: incompatible browser.</h1>

    Ironically, <title> should be inside <head>..</head> so the *page* is incompatible with Internet standards. Meanwhile....
  • In around 1983 some UK magazines carried software on flexi-disk on their covers. The idea was to dub the flexi-disk onto tape and then load the software via tape. It usually didn't work for numerous reasons. I recall only once being successful, and that was after many retries. It would have been quicker to copy the software from a printed listing.

    One magazine even published an adventure game, with a prize to the first to complete it, in this format. They got a lot of complaints.

    I remember when the first cover-mounted CD-Rom appeared over here. I bought the magazine, even though I didn't have a CD-Rom drive at the time. The CD was padded out with appalling audio tracks.

  • They still make these cards!

    One of the UK PC shops specialising in games sells them for around 40 UKP. Contains an ISA card with 2 phono jacks, the relevant cable, and some Windows software for reading and writing to tape. They've had them in stock for a couple of years.

  • Hey I agree with most of your points. However, IFRAMEs are not part of any standard.

    Maybe you should check again: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/frames.html#h -16.5

  • Tape Drives Are An Anachronism (Score:3)

    by baudtender ( 80377 ) on Tuesday December 12, 2000 @05:55AM (#565407)
    I think that tape drives are a technology that deserves to go the way of the punch card. While everyone talks about the speed of backing up on such devices, the amount of time that it takes to restore from one is rarely mentioned. And for good reason - on many of these devices, doing a full restore of 5GB or more after a drive death will have you scratching your butt for days (yes, that's plural) waiting for the damn thing to finish. While it's better than no restore at all, I don't think many people recognize just how long their critical systems will be down. In my book, the only mechanism worth using for backing up a single large IDE drive is another IDE drive! With plenty of fast 40GB UDMA-3 drives popping up on Price Watch for well under $140, I decided that in the long run it is much more economical to put in one of those removeable IDE trays and back up to a second (or incrementally, a third or fourth when you look at the cost of a 40GB tape backup device) IDE drive.

  • I've backed up a couple of times to CDRW, but haven't found a way that is convenient or easy to restore. Recommendations anyone?

    Make a bootable CD w/ a minimal live system on it, a tar of that same system and the basic tools like cfdisk, tar, gunzip, mke2fs (or whatever filesystems you need/use). The install tar from Debian is a good choice for that.

    The backup disks should consist of stand alone tar files (NOT a split tar.gz!) made from /. To restore, boot the rescue, fix/re-make your partitions. Mount them on top of /mnt. Now, cd /mnt ; tar xvfz /instimage.tgz ; chroot /mnt /bin/bash ; lilo

    You now have a bootable system on the HD with enough utilities to restore from the backup CDR(w)s.

  • Encapsulation ? (Score:3)

    by mirko ( 198274 ) on Tuesday December 12, 2000 @06:00AM (#565411) Journal
    Maybe (if this is not directly possible) you could encapsulate the raw data to be saved in video struct : this way, any software aimed at exploiting these data would "see" proper video whereas an eye would only see some "noise" ?
    Why "if this is not directly possible" ? I once used my camera's 32Mb Smartmedia card to store MP3 in order to carry these between 2 laptops and it has been unusable since then.
    That's why I guess there might be a problem with some types of data.
    --
  • The Exabyte 5 GB tape backup unit used the same tapes and mechanism found in 8MM analog camcorders. I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen with the new media, also.

  • Exabyte Drives are 8mm Video, Basically (Score:3)

    by ssclift ( 97988 ) on Tuesday December 12, 2000 @06:08AM (#565415)

    In the 1980's my Dad got an Exabyte drive for his VMS cluster at work (ca. 1Gb back then, I think). The big selling point was the ease of getting media: standard 8mm video tapes. He tested various brands until settling on a couple that produced consistently good backups. He's been able to recover decade+ old backups from those video tapes, much older than the oldest 9mm backup tapes that still work.

    Eventually I bought an Exabyte drive for the lab I sys-admined as a grad student.

    Of course, manufacturers would love to FUD-you into buying their "data-grade" tape, but the video tape works just as well most of the time. I think Fuji and Maxell were good brands, but I'll have to check with Dad first. I've got Exabyte backups on video tapes; it's a very good system. Just remember that nothing is forever: re-tape your media regularly (which does not mean often, just regularly).

  • VCR backup folklore (Score:5)

    by Megane ( 129182 ) on Tuesday December 12, 2000 @06:13AM (#565420)
    Here's a little story I heard about a VHS backup system. Seems a pawn shop had acquired one of these beasties, and decided to use it to back up their computer data.

    One night somebody broke into the pawn shop, saw the VCR, pulled the tape out of it, turned to the camera, smiled and waved. He thought he had pulled the security tape. The cops had a real good picture of him which was more than enough to put him in jail for quite some time.

  • 8mm backup machines have been able to use regular tape for a long time. my experience has been that these backup tapes can not be depended on. you need data quality media that was designed for archival purposes. but this is old hat.
  • I was wondering if anyone was going to catch that! If you are too freaking lazy and only code web pages that 95% of the people in the world can't read, then HOW is this going to help Linux?? I hate to say this but until we get a perfect world(never happen), you should at least TRY to be accomodating to ALL browsers. Remember, some Linux folk are stuck using Windows at work by corporate standard.
  • A few years ago I picked up a device that attached to the parallel port and the VCR hooked up to it. I think it was called a "backer"? The thing never worked. I tried a few high quality VCR's but the error correction always screwed up.

    Oh well,..not like I do anything important enough to backup anyway.
  • Alpha Micro - what a blast from the past!

    10 years ago (or more) the UK end of Alpha Micro sold PC-based SCO Xenix systems. The hardware was made by a company called Rexon.

    We had one nicknamed 'The Pig'. It was a huge 20MHz 386-DX machine with 6MB of RAM, and a lot of ISA slots. One novel feature was that all hard disks were in removable trays, making it possible to remove the drive without having to take the cover off. Of course they weren't hot-swappable. It got knocked out in a storm before I arrived at the place, and was repeatedly being reinstalled (usually by me!), before a fortune was spent on reparing it.

    What has this got to do with the original topic? Nothing, really.

  • just use a tape drive, with data quality DATs? HP has made them for years.
  • What are you talking about? both Lynx [freshports.org] and Links [freshports.org] work just fine for me.
    --
  • Jesus, that is *so* 1997.

    I thought everybody got over this browser superiority bit when they realized
    that every browser sucks in it's own special way.
    And don't give me this crap about Nutscrape being 'standards compliant', they did their share of embrace and extend.

    This idiot needs to get a clue - don't exclude browsers, just write compliant HTML,
    and if you're gonna take a stand against standards
    violation, do it in a way that affects the company violating the standards, not the user that
    may contribute to your project. A stupid 'denied' page is not going to get me to switch browsers -
    it's just going to make me hit the 'Back' button.

    --K
    ---
  • I wasn't talking about mirroring in the RAID
    sense, nor do I think that RAID is a good
    backup solution due to the physical catastrophes
    that can happen to a site - fire, flood, theft,
    etc. When you take a mirrored RAID drive offline,
    you lose synch and destroy the whole driving
    principal behind it.

    Just use the second hard drive just as you would
    a tape drive, and then take it offline and into
    safe storage at the conclusion of each backup.
    Most backup software will talk to an IDE drive
    just fine and treat it just as if it were a
    (really really fast) tape drive.

    My point of using a third or fourth drive for
    incremental backups directly addresses your
    "oops" concern. Or, if you're using a 10GB
    hard drive and your backup drive is 40GB, you
    can simply partitiion the 40GB and do rotation
    backups to the same physical drive.

    It really is no trouble at all transporting an
    IDE drive once it's protected in a mobile tray.
    Heavier and more fragile than a tape cartridge,
    I'll grant you, but it's a small price to pay
    for the relative benefits.

    The real drawbacks to my scheme are that unless
    you're using a special IDE controller and drive,
    hot-swapping is a REAL bad idea. The system
    must be shut down to insert or remove the
    backup IDE drive. So perhaps a hot-swap SCSI
    drive would be more appropriate for a 24X7
    critical system. Secondly, doing this on a
    Windows system requires extra care, due to
    their goofy drive-letter reassignment methods.

    I really can't think of any other drawbacks, but
    I'd sure like to hear them if anyone else can.

  • *Very* Nervous (Score:4)

    by StormyMonday ( 163372 ) on Tuesday December 12, 2000 @07:11AM (#565454) Homepage
    Back in the early/mid 1980s[1], I got burned by one of these. It backed up a PDP-11/23 to a VHS VCR. Management[2] bought into this as our only backup for the 11/23s.

    The first test I ran was simple:

    1. Make a full backup
    2. Delete a file
    3. Restore the file from the backup

    It didn't work. All it did was read through the entire tape and report "restore unsuccessful". No useful info. Bad tape? Maybe, but I tried with a couple of different tapes. My guess was that the software was only capable of handling "full partition" backup and restore, despite what the manual said. I assume (with no evidence) that *somebody* ran *some* tests before they bought into this.

    To add insult to injury, they bought top- of- the- line VCRs, about US$1000 each at the time. The VCRs had been in- house for less than a week before they started disappearing[3] ....

    [1] Yes, we had computers then.
    [2] Pointy hair is timeless.
    [3] I guess this was a self-solving problem, except that we had no working backup.

    --
  • They are blocking my Mozilla browser because their detection routine is broken.

    Idiots.

  • Well, the moderators are really blowing it here. Interesting or not, this is completely off topic. Recall, the topic was "Can you back up data on Audio/Visual media?"

    Now awaiting the obligatory rationalization as to why it should still not be rated "Off Topic"...

    Oh please. It's on topic because it's directly refering to a link in the posted story that around 70% of all web surfers will be unable to view because of a lame-ass browser based blocking.

    The only reason people have problems with that post is that it is saying something positive about a Microsoft product.

    Off-topic moderation is for Natlie Portman and Beowulf cluster postings - not for stuff like this. You will find 50 "Microsoft sucks" postings on your average "New Planet Found" story and I never hear anyone crying "moderators, wake up!" on those so relax a little and moderate the really BAD stuff and the really GOOD stuff. IMHO, my post didn't deserve "interesting" but it also sure has hell didn't deserve "off topic".

  • ...it affects the majority of /. readers who attempt to visit the second link mentioned in the article.
  • this would be nice to ask which media-specific peripherals/technologies could be used for other purposes.
    For example, as a former Amiga geek I used to dedicate my MIDI setup to networking tasks (it was quick enough to play)...
    And now, as a musician, I was wondering if somebody would create some AGP sound board in order to benefit from an even wider data bandwith (imagine yourself simultaneously sampling 64 CD-quality channels)...
    Of course, sysadmin could also dream of even faster AGP-based network adapters.
    Finally, the most realistic bit : the ones who are deseperately looking for some fine random number generator could also look forward to sample ambiant noise with their sound board. In this case we are dealing with easy-to write software.
    --
  • Well, the obvious solution is to write something that will convert tar files to aiffs (or pick your own favorite non-lossy format). This way, you can also *listen* to your data, just like Ellie Arroway in contact. It's like loading programs from casette all over again! And with ADAT, you could back up and restore up to 8 tracks simultaneously!
  • I've remembered a bit more.

    One magazine published a flexi with 5 tracks for different machines. Spectrum, C64, BBC and a couple of others (Oric, Dragon - certainly pre-Amstrad due to my circumstances at the time).

    I had a Spectrum, a friend had a C64. We spent hours dubbing both these two to tape with little luck, but eventually I managed to get the Spectrum one to load on my machine, only to discover that the program was a really awful basic game. My friend's C64 didn't want to play at all with his track.

    I lived in the grounds of a local Grammar School (my father was the caretaker) and one weekend spent a day trying the same with the schools only BBC Model B. No luck there, either.

    Later C&VG published another such disk, this time containing a Spectrum game in Quill format, with a competition prize for the first to solve it. I never got that one to work - pity, as I had managed to reverse engineer the Quill data format to some extent.

  • Anonymizer's being a bitch to me ... here's an alternate link [google.com] through the Google cache. I'll never understand the motivation of browser Nazis like the author(s) of that page.
  • 120 meter DAT-II tapes cost less than $10. Why bother with lower-quality media.
  • That story icon is supposed to be used for stories about the late lamented Digital Equipment Corporation, not for any story about digital media. The icon is DEC's old corporate logo. I don't know if you could get into legal trouble for this, but it's misleading, so you shouldn't do it anyway. ;) Cheers,

    Vovida, OS VoIP
    Beer recipe: free! #Source
    Cold pints: $2 #Product

  • First, a disclaimer: I work for Enhanced Software Technologies, a tape backup software company. Not that it matters, since we don't sell hardware and have no vested interest in any hardware. But I have access to just about every backup device that exists. About consumer A/V products, I have one thing to say: They really aren't that cost-effective (or safe) as a mass storage device.

    DDS-4 tapes cost about $20 if you buy them in reasonable quantity. This holds 24 gigabytes native (up to 50 gigabytes compressed). This works out to being a couple bucks less expensive per 10 gigabytes as compared to consumer tapes.

    The DDS-4 drive is a bit expensive, but if you want a cheap drive (but more expensive tapes), buy one of the OnStream IDE tape drives (which sell for under $200 thru most discounters, and store 15gb native on a $35 tape). I haven't particularly been impressed by the Onstreams (to me they're the latest incarnation of the late unlamented TR-x technology), but they are still far more reliable than any consumer A/V tape and/or drive.

    Exabyte once tried to make an 8mm tape drive that used 8mm camcorder mechanisms and tapes. It was horrendously unreliable, and forever soured many people on Exabyte and on 8mm tape backup in general. Exabyte learned their lesson -- their follow-on (the Mammoth series) and its tapes were engineered from scratch to be digital computer backup devices. It's sad that too few remember such lessons and would be willing to entrust their data again to A/V quality tapes and drives.

    -Eric

  • I don't mean to be petty, and I don't usually complain about the minor errors that slip by on /. but...

    The use of the logo of a company once known as the Digital Equipment Corporation for an article that discusses IEEE 1394 video cameras for data backup seems like a glaring lack of knowledge about the computer industry before 1998. (DEC was bought by Compaq in 1998)

    While I wouldn't suggest striking the trademark Digital logo from the library as it may be appropriate for some articles on legacy systems, care should be taken that it isn't mistaken as a generic image for anything "digital" - in the opposite of analog sense.

  • No. (Score:2)

    by ASCIIMan ( 47627 )
    Let me explain why that wouldn't work.

    • First of all, you cannot just rename a zip file to get an avi file. The file formats are completely diferent. AVIs have all sorts of stuff like frame timings and audio-video interleaves (which is what AVI stands for), etc, in addition to whatever format you would normally compress an avi with, all of which zip files do not contain.
    • Now, if you ever were able to get a valid avi from a zip file, the LOSSY compression when you put the file on DV would take care of all those bits you put in the zip file and randomly change them around as it sees fit, because you "can't see the difference". DV uses highly compressed MPEG2; you could never fit an hour of digital video in 12.6 or so gigs if it wasn't highly compressed with a lossy format. It would take up more than 10 times the space.
    • Finally, if you were able to do all this, your FAT idea probably would not work. See explanation above.

    There is one way you could do this, however, which is if you didn't use the rename zip -> avi step and instead focused on tricking the camera into accepting data instead of pre-compressed video. IIRC, most DV camcorders essentially don't check their input for validity as a DV-format video. In this case, you just need to be able to do a direct stream copy of data into the camera's IEEE-1394 port, preferably with some error correction, which is what the whole article is about.

    This is probably just as easy to do in Windows as in Linux, in that both (currently) lack usable programs to do this.

  • You're right that for home users, tape drives a technology of the past.

    But, tapes are not there for simple backup, there are there for desasters (both logically - whops, that rm was not was I wanted - and physically - storm, fire, earthquakes, etc).

    And I can't take the drive and put it somewhere else easily. Well, perhaps on my home system, but not on the 10+ terabyte storage systems of my customers. This storage is already mirrored, i.e., stored on RAID-1 systems. One must not trust RAID-5 in HA environments, believe me. That is the point when hierarchical storage systems (HSMs) come into play. And there, I still trust my tape robots that are connected to the good ol' MVS system. It's hard to beat them.

    By the way, the real problems are somewhere else. Restoring data from pentabyte-sized archives is difficult, and it doesn't matter on which media they are.

  • I remember doing this on my TI/99-4A. What a nightmare. I did pick up a copy of the Timex Sinclair List Manager software on cassette tape at a garage sale this summer. Best $0.25 I ever spent. It's still new in the shrink wrap!
  • The dumbest part is that the page renders perfectly fine [google.com] in IE. The only reason this asshole is doing it is to force users to switch just to view his lame site.

    Limiting choice is a bad thing when MS does it and it's bad thing when assholes like him do it.

    --
  • No, Windows 2.0

  • ANSI standard tapes haven't gone away. I worked on some ANSI tape utilities a few years ago. They were used on 9track, 8mm, DAT, IBM 3480(?), etc. Sure, it might not be as widespread as tar, cpio or some other formats, but many places still use them.

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