30 year backups, MiniDV Tapes £1.88, Blank DVDs for 10p, Cheap(ish) DVD Writer..

Blank DVDs 10p each disk only x2 and DVD-R but cheap that's 100 blank DVD-R x2 speed for £9.99 inc vat here is a separate thread on P&P 99p offer


and MiniDV £1.88 each there is a seperate thread on P&P 99p offer

If you want a reliable DVD drive (I'm on my 9th replacement from Sony!) I have 8 DVD drives for work and the NEC ones are great. (Why pay extra for a Pioneer drive? Pioneer use NEC drives and are about 9 months behind NEC drives they are based on) NEC drives as well as being very good for reliablilty are also the best for MEDIA COMPATIBILITY (compared to Sony, HP (OEMed by Philips) and Philips) and will work with a very broad range of media from the cheapest x1 speed to the latest professional disks! For £3 more than the new Sony's on lowestonthe web worth considering.

If you are wondering if you need to upgrade your DVD writer, the DVD RAM disc are good for back ups. The dyes in CDs and DVDs are not as stable and only last a few years. DVD RAM was designed for longer life storage and is MUCH more reliable (and costly) than other DVD format. "Long life — without physical damage, data is retained for 30 years minimum."

But if you have valuable material (e.g. Photos and Video) this might be a route worth considering: A drive that supports DVD-RAM as well as + and - R(W) this might be worth considering for long term backs to DVD RAM there is a grabbit post for DVD RAM from Argos and Amazon. Stick to branded stuff like Panasonic or Mitsubushi Chemical (Verbatim) or check the dye manufacture to gauge stabiltly if you are that way inclined.
Finally a good drive and stable media are worthless unless you verify your backups. With verifying a back you may find you have a stable coaster and data loss! For DVD burning software I like Nero not the cheapest but very reliable, just a suggestion as the software in XP (cut down Roxio) is poor at best it does not even verify data written to disk! Also XP does not support UDF on DVD RAM it uses FAT32. FAT32 has known stability and integrity issues, hence the WinFX project.

If you do not use Nero or othersoftware that verifies backups: Users you just use XPs built in CD/DVD software remember with DVD RAM you get "Automatic hardware verification of written data, no need to verify manually via software."

UDF has much wider support and is a better format in terms of reliability and compatibility now and into the future. Again Nero fixes this with the INCD utility included in their software that lets you use a UDF disk like a Hard disk in Windows: Easy, stable and compatible.

Just some thoughts on what people might, and might not, use this cheap media for.

If you get one of the new drives (like the NEC above) remember to buy DVD RAM discs that are not in a cartridge as you will be paying extra for the cartridge! If you get some disc in a cartridge you can pop the disc out see the SVP FAQ.

Thanks to searcher2 for this post.