archiving P2 cards

I've been shooting with my HVX200 for a year and have backed up all media to pairs of OWC 500 GB drives, but I've continued to worry about how to archive long-term. Quantum has a drive for such purposes but it costs about $6k, too much for me. I've tried to research LTO as an alternative, since it seems well established in the IT departments of the corporate world, but I haven't been able to find much information, especially for Macs.

So my current answer is to use dual layer DVD. At 8.5 GB each one will hold the contents of our 8 GB cards. When we move up to 16 or 32 GB cards, the drive and Roxio's Toast will allow recording across multiple DVDs. At around $2/disk it's cheaper than archiving to a drive, and may even be more stable... though none of us will know until it's too late.

Barry Green was kind enough to point out the importance of write-protecting cards before moving them into a Mac, and I've continued that protection by locking the files once they're on my drives. If you don't, you'll find that copying on the Finder level will regularly yield errors.

So far I've shot about 500 cards in the last year and lost only two: once in erasing before transferring and the other, who knows. I love the quality of the footage, but file management has been much more work than I ever anticipated. If you have any experience with any of the P2 workflow on a Mac--especially archiving-- and can recommend strategies I'd welcome them.

Thanks,


GPW