An archivist's perspective (Score 1)

This is a fundamental issue in the long term preservation of digital multimedia materials in archives. I am speaking from the perspective of the field of archives and the approaches being developed for digital preservation in these contexts, but generally the goals are the same as any digital storage project:

1. Standard, non-proprietary formats:

For video a bit tougher than audio, where the Broadcast WAV File has become the preservation standard format for audio, and still images where TIF reigns--there really is not video equivalent. For native DV, you'd ideally want to store it uncompressed--which isn't going to happen for most of us at home. JPEG2000 holds some promise for lossless compression, but isn't widespread. The goal here is to compress as little as possible and store in a standard (ideally non-proprietary) file format. That stated I'm aware of people using various kinds of Quicktime files for this purpose, although it makes me shiver.

2. Redundancy:

More than one HDD in more than one place. RAID and LTO (or some other datatape) if possible. DVD-ROM, DVD-Video. In an archival preservation context this is achieved through geographically separated servers and datatape back up, LOCKSS, etc.--ideally that is. I still have a lot of HDDs with audio content sitting on shelves.

3. Migration:

Migrate from storage hardware/media before its reached the expected end of its physical lifespan, and before hardware support for access has vanished. Batch convert files to new standard formats before the old formats are not supported any longer.

If you know how to make them go, checksums are a good plan too.

andy