Have you ever heard of 2 inch quadruplex? How about Betamax? If you are over forty you probably heard of Betamax. Both are videotape formats that are basically the same as the “tape” that is in all of those old VHS tapes you have boxed up. You know the ones. There are little Becky's first words, Steve's first steps, the wedding ceremony of your oldest daughter, even great grandma at her last birthday party before she passed away.

Precious, precious memories that are recorded on a media that is not designed to last forever. Anything after ten years is pushing it for any kind of videotape. Having the memories recorded digitally onto videotape is no better because the video is still being recorded onto a fragile tape that degrades much quicker than originally thought.

Videotape is a long piece of plastic film that looks like a roll of tape. Different formats run at different speeds through the machines that play and record them. They come in different widths and lengths, and they are housed in different sizes of cassettes and are even available on reels. All of it is still plastic film with tiny iron particles coated onto it with a binder so that the tape can store magnetically coded information.

Lot's of things can go wrong with any recording put onto a media that needs to physically move or come in contact with play and record parts of a machine. Just as old records can be scratched, videotape can be physically damaged inside the machine as it is dragged through rollers and over the play/record heads. It can be stretched and broken at any moment. Just playing a tape wears away some of the iron particles. That's why all of the machines needed regular cleaning—to get the iron particle residue off of the play/record heads from the tapes that have been played!

So maybe just leaving the tapes in the box will keep them safe until you can get them transferred? Sorry, but the answer there is no. The tape itself reacts to slight environmental changes over time that we would not notice at all. We can be comfortable over a wide temperature range without any ill effects. A videotape cannot. Over time with slight changes in temperature and humidity tape will begin to release its iron particles from the binder.

It looks okay, but when it is put into a machine and played, the magnetically encoded electronic information will be destroyed with that playing of the videotape. It happens when the binder that holds the magnetic iron particles has degraded allowing the particles to just rub off as the tape is played.

Seriously, why would you want your precious memories stored on a media that is played in a machine that has a part called a “pinch” roller? And it does exactly what is implied. It pinches the tape!

But all is not lost if you leave it to the professionals to get the memories on those old tapes transferred into a true digital format and recorded onto an archival DVD. That's why we are here at Got Memories. We know that you “got memories” and we want to make sure that you keep them forever.