"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
news:znr1064966716k@trad...

In article
writes:

I'm assuming DVD is not recommended for archival purposes...

It depends on how you define "archive." If it's to put it away for 50
years, nobody knows about DVD's ability to support that yet. If it's
to get it on to a secondary medium which might be more playable than
the primary medium when the next potentially great archive thing comes
along, then DVD is probably fine. But don't throw away your original
video tapes. Even if YOU can't play them any more, maybe somebody will
be able to in another 100 years, assuming there's something worth
playing on them.

Assuming also that all the oxide hasn't flaked off in 50 years. Last I read,
Sony claimed a shelf life of 20 years on videotapes before noticeable
playback degradation, and that was when stored optimally (tails out, low
humidity, exercised once a year).

As a photographer, I run into this "archival" stuff all the time. People
think BW film and prints are "archival" because they're still around after
100 or so years, totally ignoring the fact that they mostly don't look half
as good as they did originally. The advantage of digital is not being able
to store the image on one medium forever, it's being able to keep it alive
by moving it nondestructively to another medium thus extending it's life.
That requires work. I figure transferring my stuff every 20 years is
worthwhile. If it's too much trouble, that's yet another form of editing.