The music industry has a big problem: Dying hard drives from the 1990s
Once music is released, copies flood the planet: CDs, vinyl, digital tracks and files, maybe a few tapes. But all those copies come from master recordings. Should anyone need to make more copies, a trip is required to the vaults to haul out those original masters.
But here’s the question: In what format are those master recordings stored? If the music was made on analogue gear, then the music is most likely stored on magnetic tape in climate-controlled, highly secure areas, maybe run by a company like Iron Mountain. But what if we’re dealing with digital masters? Well, then storage has to be hard drives, right? And therein lies the problem.
According to a story in Ars Techinca, hard drives used in the early days of digital recording (i.e. mid-80s to the early 90s) are dying. Yes, they’re carefully stored, but the drives themselves aren’t stable. Those old drives were never made with long-term storage in mind. Once any component of a drive fails, the data it contains is lost forever.
Say, for example, you want to access the music on an HDD master of an album recorded in 1991. The biggest question when you mount it is “Will the drive spin? Or have all the bearings dried out causing everything to seize up irreparably?”
Another problem. Optical media suffers its own kind of rot. Discs lose their magnetic charges. Flash drives lose their ability to hang onto data after a while. And while you might think that solid-state drives are pretty indestructible, they’re not. And this decay and loss happens far more quickly than expected.
Archiving music is tricky and getting trickier. Does the music industry have a plan for saving these digital archives? We’d better hope so. Meanwhile, keep backing everything up multiple times.
I think that is why it makes sense to backup things to more stable media like in film & tv where much of the digital footage gets backed up on LTO tapes. As far as I’m aware, these are pretty solid. I used to work on Degrassi and we had a HUGE amount of hard drives with footage backed up for easier use (retrieving footage from LTO can be time consuming and pricey) and one of my tasks as a lowly trainee assistant editor was booting up these hard drives to make sure they still worked every year. lol. Fun? Nope, but necessary.
We have known since even before the invention of writing, the only way to preserve media is to faithly copy it frequently.
Much of my dats from the 90’s is last. That which survives is not the masters. I still have printed and digital copies of my phd. But the printed copies are missing one page due to a printing error. The digital form i still have is lossy djvu. I certainly don’t have the latex the original data plots, etc. I do have a condensed form of the raw data on exabyte. But i have never owned an exabyte tape drive, so i have no way of discovering if it is readable. Unless i can also recover the code is used to compact it, the data would be unusable.
‘Lost Forever’ is a bit over dramatic. For 40 years there have been recovery specialists who can extract data from dead and damaged drives. Just sayin’.