My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.
To me, this is just another story of the music industry’s technical incompetence.
Even in the 1990s, everyone would have known that hard drives were not a long-term archival storage solution. This is like crumpling up a piece of paper, tossing it in the corner, then being upset decades later when your “archival solution” had issues.
I’m sure they considered anyone telling them they needed to spend money to be a pain in the ass the same way companies don’t follow the recommendations of their IT departments.
The piece of paper is basically much more likely to survive in a corner barring a fire. I have crumpled pieces of paper from 20 years ago. My PATA hard drive… I don’t even have a computer with that connector
A bunch of paper tossed into a corner could get wet, mouldy, get munched on by rats, etc. But, I know what you mean. Spinning plates full of magnetized bits with a connector technology that only lasts a decade at most is hardly going to be reliable, even if stored under ideal conditions.
Not to mention bit rot
The problem isn’t even the hard drives, it’s how they are managing them. There’s not many digital data storage solutions around that you can dump into a closet for a few decades and then still read.
You have to regularly test your hard drives, so that when one fails you can take your other copy of the data and put it on a new drive.
I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable
This is important, and for some media, it should be more often than that.
People forget that flash memory uses electrical charge to store data. It’s not durable. If left unpowered for too long, that data will get corrupted. A failure might not even be visible without examining every bit of every file.
Keep backups. Include recovery data (e.g. PAR2). Store them on multiple media. Keep them well-maintained (e.g. give flash drives power). Mind their environment. Copy them to new storage devices before the old ones become obsolete.
It’s funny that with all our technology, paper is still the most durable storage medium (under normal conditions) that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
This is where “piracy” is actually the industry’s saving grace. Decades or centuries later, will record labels exist and be well-managed (and flush with cash) enough to preserve archival copies of their artists catalogs? Probably not.
Will obscure weirdos exist all around the world on Usenet, IRC, or seeding torrents? Possibly.
What is really being discussed here is archiving of master recordings and session files. The publically avaliable releases themselves aren’t really in jeopardy. Orthough piracy probably does provide an extra layer of security to more obscure releases.
I thought I read somewhere that when they were making one of the Toy Story movies, there was some catastrophic data loss that nearly tanked the whole production. But then one of the animators came back from maternity and said wait, I think I have most of it synced to my home server? And the next thing you know, John Lasseter himself is barrelling down the highway to her place and it turned out yeah, she did have it.
The value of distributed redundancy
Something to be said for the wfh movement too.
Im really hoping, waiting, for a good dense long-term storage medium. It doesn’t have to be fast, but large, cheap, and durable. I want a way to backup my plex library, or even, daily backups of documents and project files, and I don’t want to think about them ever again.
M-Disk is rated to last like
1001000 years. They are also working on a 125 Terabyte CD. Optical storage is the way to go.Optical storage
so they’ve solved bitrot? nice
The main cause of bitrot in older disks is the organic dyes fading (aside from REALLY cheap disks where delamination was a problem), whereas M-Disc uses an inorganic carbon material
TIL, thanks!
There is no “write and forget” solution. There never has been.
Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts? No, we have only those that have been copied over and over in the course of the centuries. Historians knows too well. And 90% of anything ever written by humans in all history has been lost, all that was written on more durable media than ours.
The future will hold only those memories of us that our descendants will take the time to copy over and over. Nothing that we will do today to preserve our media will last 1000 years in any case.
(Will we as a specie survive 1000 more years?)
Still, it our duty to preserve for the future as much as we can. If today’s historians are any guide, the most important bits will be those less valuable today: the ones nobody will care to actually preserve.
Citing Alessandro Barbero, a top notch Italian current historian, he would kill no know what a common passant had for breakfast in the tenth century. We know nothing about that, while we know a tiny little more about kings.
There is: mdiscs. Allegedly 1000 years durability even in Blu-ray format. Should be good enough for most important things. The best tapes AFAIK 30- 100 years
Problem is how to read the disk, especially after generations. Will they retain the knowledge to build and operate a device for this?
I wish there was a cheap and millennia-long lasting microfilm you could transfer books to. A projector is a pretty simple device to operate. Hmm that reminds me of “Last Words (2020)”.
Microfilms used to be sold as having a life expectancy of up 500 years. But in my experience they were a pain to use and the machines costly to maintain. The films would tear regularly too. Also the quality of the recorded image could be very poor sometimes.
