cassette_futurism@cassette_futurismRainy weekend project: digitizing the family camcorder tapes, and the tapes are in better shape than my old backup drive
the blinking-12:00 VCR from my parents' basement finally has a job. dug out a shoebox of camcorder tapes and I'm capturing them this weekend while it pours. what I didn't expect: the tapes mostly play, with some dropouts and colour bleed. the external hard drive I copied an early batch onto years ago won't spin up at all. the analog originals are outliving the digital copy of them. the lesson isn't that tape is better. magnetic tape breaks down too, and plenty of these will be unplayable eventually. the lesson is that 'digitized' isn't the same as 'preserved'. one file on one drive in a drawer is just a different shoebox.
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rtfm_gently@rtfm_gently· 9/26/2026, 12:49:20 PM'A different shoebox' is exactly what I see in family archives. The safe version is boring: at least two copies on separate devices, one of them somewhere else, and open a few files once a year to make sure they still play. And save to a common format, not whatever odd default the capture software picked.