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Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Saving Home Movie Tapes to an External Hard Drive

We have a bunch of home movies on 8mm tapes and on VHS tapes. I got this device to convert them to digital files for easier storage. Tapes deteriorate over time but digital files can be backed up and kept in several different places to be sure they stay safe.

The device is the VHS to DVD by Honestech.

It's $80 for the device which comes with cables that connect to your PC's USB port and to your VCR or Camcorder's video ports. You can copy the tape to a DVD in your PC or to a video file for saving on your hard drive. I don't use DVD's anymore since they don't hold much and external hard drives are pretty cheap. We keep home movies and photos on an external hard drive. We have additional hard drives for backups including one in our safe deposit box. We switch that one for an updated one once or twice a year when we're back in Schenectady.

We have these hard drives: 

We have these Thumb Drives:  


It works out to be cheaper than DVD's and easier to deal with because everything can be on one device instead of dozens of DVD's.

2 hours of our home movies works out to be about 1.4GB so one DVD would hold about 6 hours of my home movies. The 1.5TB external hard drive would hold about 2 thousand hours of these movies. I am playing around with different video formats to achieve the best quality copy that this device will create so the size of the files may end up being larger when I'm finished. Even so, it will be cheaper than a huge pile of DVD's and easier to use.

We also have many movies and tv shows on an external hard drive and we plug it into our TV's USB port and can watch those shows anytime right on the TV.

I have had this device for over 2 years and have procrastinated that long at starting this project. As usual, the job ended up being easier than I thought it would be. The conversion takes time though. You have to copy the tapes at the regular play rate so a 2 hour tape takes 2 hours to convert. No problem, we have lots of time and we can do other things while the conversion takes place. Last night we went for a walk while converting. It automatically stops when the tape reaches the end.

There is a newer version of the device and software but I think it is just an upgrade from USB 2.0 to USB 3.0. This is for faster data transport but it really doesn't matter, this one works just fine.

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