Foreign Perspectives

Most of the time you don’t really notice the rate at which technology moves along but when you dig out a piece of not-that-old technology and try to bring it up to date you can really be surprised.

Take my old SuperVHS tapes for instance. I was recording my holiday trips on those for nearly ten years and thought that it was time I sat down and got them copied onto the computer before the old SuperVHS player packs in and I lose them.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to do that for a while now but only just got around to making a serious start on the task a few weeks back thanks to a new version of a TV to PC interface I bought recently for another purpose. The first surprise was that although the new device is much smaller than the PVR that it replaces, there’s now no noticeable delay after you press the record button and when it begins recording. Well, it was bound to be faster so I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised me.

What’s more amazing though is that although each 45 minute tape takes up around 1.2GB, that’s no longer a large chunk of disc space. At the time I bought the SuperVHS camcorder, the largest amount of space that I had available was 20MB (in 1993); the machine that I’m typing this on has 200GB ie ten thousand times the storage capacity. I originally thought that I’d have to copy the “tapes” onto an external drive but in fact the internal drive has more than enough space to hold all of them.

Shouldn’t I be copying them off onto DVD? I will be in due course but I think it’s more reliable to keep them on the internal disc and make them part of the normal backup process. There’s much more chance that I’ll be able to view them years from now if I do that: on DVD chances are that 1) they could get scratched and rendered unreadable and 2) DVDs may become obsolete and therefore unreadable in perhaps as little as 10 years.

And I did buy that new external drive but then I buy a new one every year as part of my normal backup plan. 250GB in a nice pocket sized drive is fantastic.