This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
Oh, fuck. Prince's Vault.... God I hope the estate has a plan to preserve all of that.....
Many films and tv programs survive only thanks to a total stranger keeping their own copy. For a long term survival of any media it has to be copied and distributed far and wide.
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.
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
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.
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.
Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts?
In some cases we do. For example, the documents at Pompeii, those at Qumran, and other rare instances where documents have been preserved from the time they're written. It's also true that we have far more copies than originals, and that we've lost most of the works of many ancient authors.
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
Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts?
We do have originals of some much older texts, though (cuneiform on clay that was fired after impression seems to be a pretty good archival medium, overall). We'd probably have a lot more original Greek and Roman documents if they hadn't been destroyed in wars and other disasters, or recycled for various purposes. There's a big survival rate difference between documents that receive basic care throughout their lives—no rough handling handling, minimal direct sunlight exposure, and some degree of temperature and humidity control in the storage area—and those left to fend for themselves. That's why old documents in surprisingly good condition sometimes turn up in caves, which tend to have constant temperature and humidity levels.
(But, yeah, current electronic media doesn't have much chance, with select optical disk media stored under carefully chosen conditions offering the best chance for your files being retrievable decades later, if you can find a drive to read them on.)
BRB, etching all my MP3s into clay tablets
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.
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.
Sophistication often creates fragility. The human mind marvels at sophistication naturally; appreciation for resilience usually only comes after that fragile thing has broken. Of course it's too late by then.
All them young whipper snappers will continue to learn these life lessons the hard way, it seems.
If I had a cent every time an artist on patron had their computer die on them and lost works in progress or all their old stuff... I'd afford a few coffees.
Tape backups, baby.
No, I don't have a library of those. I don't even have a tape drive.
Anything important, I write on clay tablets.
Yeah if you're looking for long term it needs to be archival media. Many people think the flash drive will hold it forever but they are potentially the most fickle.
But what actually is "archival"?
Like, what technology normal person has access to counts at least as enthusiast level archival?
Magnetic tape, optical media, flash, HDD all rot away, potentially within frighteningly short timeframes and often with subtle bitrot.
1960s style punch cards. Made of concrete.
I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted.
M-DISC, at a guess. The media would last long enough at least for grandkids, who will have bigger things to worry about.
I got four HDDs, some are almost 10 years old. They work great but I know that won't be for forever.
I have probably lost lots of pictures die to head crash. WD especially
I only lost two HDDs in my life. Both in 2009. And yes, they were WDs
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.
It does has to be fast enough that you can transfer the files to a different disk within your lifetime.
Tape is cheap and durable if you store it properly. Except the tape drive is expensive af.
Microsoft is working on glass storage. A glass plate can last 10,000 years according to Microsoft. Hopefully that tech will get miniaturized and available to consumers within our lifetimes.
As a former audio engineer in the days where we still used it- tape can rot.
how music is so complicated to archive now
??
It's not a bad start though, and how hard would it be for the people who have surviving copies to copy it to "the next best new thing" in 10 years? The problem is of course that sequence would need to be continued on, like a tradition, which is doable as well.
That's why I back up my data on stone tablets in Cunieform.
Seriously though, if you wanted data to last for centuries, what would be your best bet? Would it be some sort of 3D-printed mechanical storage? At least plastics are generally not biodegradable, though they are photodegradable, so I guess you'd want to stick your archive in a dry cave somewhere?
Or what about this idea of encoding the data in the DNA of some microbe and cutting it loose? What could possibly go wrong?
Archival grade m-discs, apparently. I had the same question. https://www.howtogeek.com/858426/whats-the-best-way-to-store-data-for-decades-or-centuries/
Please stop that, DNA is good for mutations, not for long-term consistency.
My system is to duplicate to fresh media once in a while. It's more hands on, but it's the only option I have. My NAS will be cloned to new drives in the next few years.
Well, nothing lasts forever. I'd say distributing them on something that lasts 10+ years is better than doing noting. Otherwise they just get lost, buried in the attic or the next harddrive crash takes them.
