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Burn to DVD or keep on harddrive

R

Raunien

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 3, 2011
541
66
I have a lot of visual media on my external harddrive (about 2TB worth) and they're mostly in m4v format. My goal is to keep them viable (playable) for as long as possible while viewing them from time to time.

So my question is should I burn them to DVDs (single or dual layer) or keep them on my external harddrive as is.

My main worry is playing movies off a harddrive will shorten its lifespan
 
Raunien said:
I have a lot of visual media on my external harddrive (about 2TB worth) and they're mostly in m4v format. My goal is to keep them viable (playable) for as long as possible while viewing them from time to time.

So my question is should I burn them to DVDs (single or dual layer) or keep them on my external harddrive as is.

My main worry is playing movies off a harddrive will shorten its lifespan
Click to expand...

http://go.iomega.com/en-us/products/multimedia-drive/screenplay-multimedia-drives/screenplay-mx2/?partner=4760

i use one of these for playing my m4v, avi, etc.. has a 1TB hard drive in it, than less wear on your backup drive
 
To burn 2 TB of data onto SL-DVDs would amount to 475 DVDs at least, if you use DL-DVD you would only need 250 or so.
Wouldn't it be much cheaper to get another external HDD and use that as backup (which incidentally would also take a bit less than burning DVDs*)?

* which would take around 2.3 days at constant write speeds of 8x, while copying 2 TB over USB 2.0 would take less than 20 hours
 
Raunien said:
So what's the consensus? Keep the videos on an external?
Click to expand...

From the two posts you got, it seems to be that way. One post recommended getting a media playback HDD, another post recommended getting a backup.
Maybe consolidate those two recommendations into one, and get a 2 TB media playback HDD, if you need such device.
If you really fear about wearing out your HDD and losing your files, back them up. As one poster pointed out, an extra HDD would be cheaper and less time consuming.

I have one 500 GB HDD for my photographs (digital and analog) libraries and editing documents, one 500 GB HDD with my personal video footage in an editing friendly format.
Both 500 GB HDDs get backed up to one 1 TB HDD via CarbonCopyCloner.
And that 1 TB HDD gets backed up to another 1 TB HDD via CarbonCopyCloner.
Therefore I have three copies of my important data.
Click to expand...
 
Thanks guys! Knew I could count on you. Appreciate the responses :D
 
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