A new thought on Archiving

Question

I have always used and advocated sharing to tape as the best means of preserving the iMovie projects which make up an iDVD.
It now occurs to me that I can buy about a dozen DVD-Rs for the price of a tape.
Is there a (hopefully freeware) utility that would take 16-20 GB of files and create a set of discs.
Does anyone do this?
I have travelled widely in Western Europe and also been to South America and am amazed that digital-8 tapes are about the only thing I've found cheapest in the UK, about 15 pounds for 5!

Answer 1

You can always do it manually and break up the project yourself onto several DVDs. Ya I know, not what you wanted, but I have not run across a free or cheap application to do this for your automatically.
Retrospect is kind of pricey although maybe not bad if you use it a lot. I do have a version of it that came bundled with something I bought. I only tried it out once to back up a folder of digital photos that was roughly 3gig (normally I backed up manually onto CDRs at the time). I found it to be slow and it used way more CDR blanks that if I had done it manually. Maybe newer versions are improved, but I haven't been inclined to invest any money in a newer version if that is the performance you get out of it. I still use Toast and do my backups manually.
One thing to keep in mind is that since DVD blanks have been known to go bad after a time, if your DVD archive of your movie projects are to be the only backups, you should make at least two sets. The advantage of tape, although now no longer the cheaper of the two (tape vs. DVDs) is that you can get a whole hour onto a tape (vs. about 20 minutes on a data DVD, but more importantly tapes rarely fail or if they do have the troubles you might lose a bit of footage, not the entire tape as you may with a DVD.
Perhaps you should consider another hard drive dedicated strictly to backing up and archiving iMovie work? Here in the USA, I see 160GB drives all the time now for about $30-$40 after rebate. I put together a 160GB external Firewire drive for under $100 US by doing this and picking up an Firewire enclosure. Then you can easily hook it up to the computer later and transfer that footage to another media when it comes available or gets cheaper such as dual layer DVDs or better yet when we finally get affordable Blu-Ray or DVD-HD drives on our computers and you can archive 20GB projects onto a single blank.
Best of luck,
Patrick