Topic: How best to store old home movies

[BlackLight]

So I have several DVDs of old home movies, dating back to the 80s and 90s, and I suspect some going back several decades earlier than that. Originally recorded on VHS, and the earlier ones on film. My father had them digitized and put on DVD in the early 2000s, and now I've inherited them. Physically, the discs look to be in pristine condition - I doubt they've been played more than once or twice, nor have they left their storage box.

So, two questions. I've tried to play one of the discs in two different PCs and my own DVD player. In the PCs, they run fine for a few minutes, and then freeze (though never in the same spot). In the DVD player, sometimes there are artifacts and glitches, forcing me to reboot, after which they play fine for a bit. But again, then it locks up and/or it automatically skips ahead to the next chapter. I should say that the PCs are both several years old, and the DVD player was new around 2004, and is seldom used. The fact that the glitches happen in different spots suggest to me that the problem is the players and not the disc. So my first question - is there a way to confirm whether or not the actual data on the discs is uncorrupted?

And second question - I want to transfer these videos over to a more permanent/sustainable platform, before the ravages of time inevitably do their damage and destroy the data on them. I've looked into cloud storage, and it looks like PCloud comes highly recommended, and appears to have its own dedicated video player. So my question is - is cloud storage my best option here? What would you do in my situation to preserve these videos?

[Prime]

Disc playback: is it *all* the discs that exhibit this behavior? If so, then it is likely the player, but it's odd that both a dedicated DVD player AND two different PCs. What kind of discs are they? DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW? I don't know that it matters, but there may be inherent problems with one of the formats.


To test for corruption, I would ask how are the files stored on the DVDs? MP4? AVI? If you can get one of the discs to read long enough, you could try copying a file to your PC and then playing the video from your computer. If the video plays fine, then a) the data isn't corrupted, and b) you're narrowing down the players as the problem. It might be a daunting task to play however many videos you have, but if you're able to copy them all to your PC (even a disk at a time) and test playing them from there, you can confirm. That leads to:

Storage/Cloud - The best option may depend on how much data you have to store. Industry best practice follows the 3-2-1 principle. 3 backups. 2 on site, 1 off site. That may mean storing all the files on your computer (first backup), backing them up to an external drive (second backup), and then syncing to a cloud service (3rd/off site backup). For home users, that's probably overkill, but having 2 copies of your data is great. One local and then either an external drive or a cloud service.


Providers like Google and Microsoft are obviously the heavy hitters, but they don't give the free accounts a lot of data. I don't know what Google gives, but my free Microsoft account gives me 15 GB. In my case, I have an O365 subscription with Microsoft, so I have 1 TB of available space in OneDrive and that works for me. Additional storage is pretty cheap though, with 200 GB at $2 a month, going up in $2/200GB increments. $4/400 GB, $6/600 GB, $8/800 GB, and $10/1 TB for additional storage.

PCloud, GoogleDrive, OneDrive, DropBox, and Box regularly make the top lists for Cloud-based Storage. It really comes down to a) how much data you have, b) the price you need to pay to store that much data, and c) what services come with it to provide the value for your dollar.

[BlackLight]

There are four discs giving me similar issues. The videos are stored on the discs in .VOB format. These videos were probably transferred onto DVD about 15 years ago, but if they've been taken out of their plastic DVD case more than 3 times in the intervening years, I'd surprised (For some reason, people preserve their home movies for the express purpose of never watching them).

Anyway, when I try to play them on PC, they generally start off okay, but then they start skipping in both audio and video, and video. The other curious difficulty I run into is when I try to copy them either to hard drive or a thumb drive, I see a similar issue. The transfer will start off fine, but after a few minutes, the transfer rate will start to slow, then eventually stall out, like the task of moving the files is just too much for my PC to handle. It never happens in the same place. It sometimes stops at 5%, sometimes at 20%, one time it got to 85%. The skips and starts never seem to happen in the same place when I try to play them. Then, when I cancel out of it, the computer takes a long time to process the command.

I do have another DVD with my senior thesis that's stored in .VOB format. That one plays perfectly, despite being even older than the four discs giving me issues. It also transfers to USB perfectly.

[Prime]

That sounds like there are physical issues with those discs. There may not be visible scratches or anything, but it could be the discs are just plain degraded.

[BlackLight]

Have you ever heard of a freeware program called ISOPuzzle? Any opinion of this or similar programs?