this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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The music can be copied to new hard drives without any loss in quality, so why are they leaving their only copy on 30 year old hard drives?
Just following longstanding studio practice of putting the masters in a vault so you can forget about them.
They’re not used to the risks of bit rot.
A studio should be able to afford a good LTO tape drive for at least one backup copy; LTO tapes last over 30 years and suffer less from random bitrot than spinning disks. Just pay someone to spend a month duplicating the entire archive every couple of decades. And every decade you can also consolidate a bunch of tapes since the capacity has kept increasing; 18TB tapes are now available: $/MB it's always far cheaper to use tape.
They could have done that with the drives, but today you'd have to go find an ATA IDE or old SCSI card (of you're lucky) that'll work on a modern motherboard.
But I'd guess their problem is more not having a process for maintaining the archives than the technology. Duplicating and consolidating hard drives once a year would have been relatively cheap, and as long as they verified checksums and kept duplicates, HDs would have been fine too.
Easy work for a digital archivist.
Music studios didn’t have those in the 1990’s.
I agree; it probably didn't occur to them. But it was a fairly common job in IT in the 90's. Not a career or job description, maybe, but a duty you got saddled with.