[MEncoder-users] Backup policies

[Ross Clement]

Dear all,

This is a question for people typical of "mencoder-users", rather than a
question about mencoder directly.

What do people on this list do in terms of backing up video. In my case my
original video will be in one of three formats:

Mini DV tape (and DV AVIs) - huge files, typically 13G for an hour or so.
Motion JPEG from my still camera - huge files, I've used it once as a trial
and got over 3G of moving images.
Screen capture from PC usage - not so huge files

Problem is, I don't have enough disk space to let everything just lie
around. I just ran out of space on my 300G usb drive.

I would like to back up all my original video in some form or other. In
particular the MiniDV and Motion JPEG files are home videos that I would
like to be able to review into the distant future. But burning tens of DVDs
per week to avoid post-camera quality loss is really not on.

At present, I generally convert things into either DVD compatible MPEG-2, or
DivX of some sort. I can back these up much more recently. But it's possible
for me to use pretty well any format for my backups providing that mplayer
(VLC et al) can read it.

What formats would people recommend, and what do others do concerning
backups.