In the 90s Your Spare VHS Could Be a Backup Hard Drive

As the 80s became the 90s, it was increasingly clear that computers were going to become part of day-to-day life. Among other things, this meant that more and more methods of memory storage would blossomed into existence. Diskettes and CD-ROMs mostly conquered the market but other, weirder alternatives were out there.

Lazy Game Reviews stumbled upon one of the more obscure: backing up a hard drive onto a VHS tape.

The sales pitch for the Danmere Backer VHS Hard Drive Backup System isn't so crazy if you imagine a society where owning a VCR was part and parcel with daily life. For $90, the now-shuttered company claimed you could store up to 4 GB on a standard-issue blank video cassette, which sold for $2-3 and had incredible artwork to boot.

However, the system had its drawbacks. Even a positive review of the program in PC World in 1998 chastised its transfer rate of 9 MB per minute. And while it was clever, it might have seemed too clever for customers. As hard drives grew more and more sophisticated, Danmere was entirely reliant on an outside technology to act as a conduit. And when weekly DVD rentals in the United States began outnumbering weekly VHS cassette rentals in 2003, it was clear the format was dying.

But nostalgia still lives. Even though VHS tapes were as bad as you remember, there's still a lot of joy in making VHS-style trailers for modern films.

Source: Lazy Game Reviews