Will your wedding video still play in twenty years?

Probably yes, if you do about ten minutes of work in the week you receive it. Almost certainly not, if you leave it in the one place it arrived and assume that is storage. Wedding video is rarely lost to corruption. It is lost to a dead laptop, an expired download link, and a drive in a drawer that nobody can find a cable for.

We have unusual standing to say this. We shoot part of every wedding on Hi8 videotape — a format that was current in the nineties and is now genuinely obsolete — so getting footage off media the world has moved past is a normal working week here, not a thought experiment.

The three ways it actually disappears

In rough order of how often it happens, and none of them look like a disaster at the time:

• The link expired. Most films are delivered by download link with a shelf life. The couple watches it, means to download it properly, and the honeymoon happens. This is the single most common way a wedding film is lost, and it happens within the first year.
• The device died and the file was only on the device. A laptop, a phone, or one external drive is not a backup — it is one copy with a failure rate.
• The media outlived its readers. This is the slow one. A DVD needs a drive nobody sells, a MiniDV tape needs a camcorder, a Hi8 tape needs us. The file is fine; nothing in your house can open it.

What to ask your videographer for at delivery

Ask before you sign, because it is much harder to obtain two years later when the studio has archived or closed:

1. The actual files, not just a streaming link. A high-bitrate H.264 or H.265 MP4 is the right ask for the film itself — it is the most widely readable video container there is, which matters more for longevity than any quality argument.
2. How long they keep their copy, in writing. Most studios keep footage months, not years. Assume their copy is a courtesy that will end.
3. Whether raw footage is available, and what it costs. Often it is, often it is a fee, and it is almost always cheaper to ask at delivery than later.
4. A version that plays on a phone. The film you actually rewatch is the one that opens without effort.

The ten minutes that protect it

The professional standard is 3-2-1: three copies, on two kinds of storage, one of them somewhere else. That is the right shape, and here is the version that a couple will actually do:

1. Download the file the day it arrives. Not the week, the day. This one step prevents the most common failure on the list above.
2. Put a copy in whatever cloud you already pay for. iCloud, Google, Dropbox — the correct answer is the one you are already inside, because you will keep paying for it.
3. Put a second copy somewhere physically different. An external drive at a parent's house is fine and costs nothing ongoing.
4. Give a copy to one other person. A sibling with the file in their Google Drive is a genuine off-site backup and the only one that survives you forgetting a password.
5. Write down where the copies are. In your notes app, with the film. Every recovery problem we see is really a locating problem.

Then look at it once a year. Not to admire it — to confirm it still opens. A backup nobody has tested is a belief, not a backup.

What about the guests' footage

It is more fragile than the film, because it lives on phones that get upgraded, and it is usually the only record of whole parts of the night. Collect it in the first week and store it with everything else — getting the video off everyone's phones is the part that actually decides whether any of it survives.