Storing training videos

[benlangfeld 1]

First up, I did search the forum and found mostly references to storing miniDV tapes, so maybe it's time to bring this topic up again

I have a growing collection of video (both inside and outside) of training jumps currently stored on a 1TB USB hard drive. That the drive might get lost or damaged concerns me, so I began looking into options. First up, the things I'm looking for are:

* Indefinite storage - not looking to delete these
* Cloud-based (a-la Dropbox/iCloud/Google Drive/Amazon S3/etc)
* Doesn't occupy space on my devices' local disk
* Cached locally for re-watching in the short term
* Easily ingested
* Easily indexed and viewable from various devices (iPad, iPhone, someone else's computer)

Dropbox and similar services don't cut it because they simply mirror part of the contents of a local disk, and I don't anticipate having enough disk space (at least continuously attached to a computer) for these videos.

Typical backup solutions fall in a similar bucket, and don't do a whole lot for making individual videos easy to find and watch without doing some sort of restore operation.

Uploading to YouTube might be an option, but it's a very slow and manual process, and simple things like grouping the inside and outside video from the same jump is onerous.

The best option I have found so far is the Apple Photos app, which has an "optimise local storage" feature which holds only low resolution versions of media on local disk, and full resolution on iCloud storage. The collection of images is available on a Mac, in a web browser, and on iOS devices and the full resolution versions are downloaded on demand and cached locally for some period. On the other hand, the downsides of this are that one is somewhat locked-in to Apple's product (there's no metadata export function), and the iOS apps don't permit viewing or editing metadata (eg jump number in the video title).

So, what does everyone else do to store their hundreds or thousands of training jump videos? Are there any better options out there?

[freefalle 0]

Redundant external hard drive..... after a while I delete the oldest stuff unless there is a specific reason I want to keep it

[Westerly 61]

Why dont you just get another hard drive? They are so cheap they are basically free.

[benlangfeld 1]

Westerly

Why dont you just get another hard drive? They are so cheap they are basically free.

Because I'd have to physically transport it off-site (where?). I trust the replication of cloud storage more as a backup solution. That solution also ignores the "accessible from any device" requirement.

[trunk 0]

With dropbox you can sync which ever folder you want on your children devices and you don't need the full mirror. It's an extremely cheap and mindless solution.

With that said, I personally copy my content to a RAID redundant NAS after an event (photos & video). I keep my treated photos on dropbox and a boogie season's worth of raw photos on my laptop for quick access. I also keep a complete mirror of my NAS at my folks house (or leave at work or the dropzone for you) which gets updated about twice a year. Granted I have all my life's content so I have a lot more than 1TB to worry about. If I was to spend time on it, I would use AWS Glacier/S3 and doing a Rsync off of a local NAS.
In all honesty, use dropbox until you outgrow the service. It's like a whole $9/month for 1TB. Also, leave a yearly/quarterly backup-backup somewhere just incase.

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