[roloru]

I have a 500 Gig Iomega external drive set up to be my Time Machine repository. It has been doing its hourly/daily/weekly/monthly backups for 6 months now and contains about 280 GB with about 220 free. I have many GBs of digital movies on miniDV tapes and on my iMac saved as iMovie files. Understanding that miniDV is being phased out and, in the future, it may be difficult to transfer archived material like this onto a computer, I am considering a separate area of storage on the external drive just for my collected old home movies. Is this a good idea and how do I do this - just drag and drop from my Movie area to the hard drive? If Time Machine has already archived these, is it redundant and/or unnecessary to do this? Thanks for any advice.

[dcpics]

I wouldn't put it all in one place, like on the one hard drive. If that drive fails then all is lost.

External drives are cheap these days and I would look at putting it on one or two others as well and also filing away the tapes.

I'm sure that for a long while if you can't get the equipment yourself to digitize the tapes you will find a service that can do it in case you lose the data.