Five years from now I have no expectations that we'll have many tape machines around at all except for maybe a HDV / DV unit. The reason will simply be that there is no demand to use them. If we can store the machines, we might keep a couple around for just in case, provided they work.
My bet is that over the next five years, working Beta SP machines are going to become very scarce. Beta SP has really gone the way of u-matic. We'm certainly not shooting on it, and we're not sending anything out on it. We haven't sent a Beta SP tape out in nearly two years. Its very hard for anyone to consider putting any money into keeping the machines running when they just aren't being used very much if at all.
The time is now to get those tapes loaded
onto hard drive in a digital format.
While a power surge or other electrical failure could take a drive out, with clean UPS filtered power this factor drops significantly.
If the next argument is, what if I can't access the drive 10 years from now because the interface doesn't exist ( EIA vs IDE vs PATA ), you should plan to make copies every 5 years. With 5 year transfers, you'll see your storage expand by a factor of 4 to 6 times in capacity for the same money as today. Another words today a bare 1TB drive is around $100 or so, 5 years from now the same $100 will buy a 6TB drive or solid state storage unit.
The time and cost to bring your assets from the old storage to the new storage will be quite minimal once you have them in a digital format. Their value could be as they say, priceless.
