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20% of hard drives from 1990s music industry have failed, making remasters impossible

CitizenVectron
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Ghost_MH

Ghost_MH

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Who was choosing hard drives for long term storage? That's crazy. Like actually mind blowing. And these people were shipping hard drives to Iron Mountain as if they had the shelf life of tape? What? Who made these choices? Especially in the 90s. Drives then were even more much more expensive per GB and not really that much faster. Someone back then chose a more fragile and more expensive tech and not really that much faster tech to archive stuff to? Why?

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CitizenVectron

CitizenVectron

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7 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

Who was choosing hard drives for long term storage? That's crazy. Like actually mind blowing. And these people were shipping hard drives to Iron Mountain as if they had the shelf life of tape? What? Who made these choices? Especially in the 90s. Drives then were even more much more expensive per GB and not really that much faster. Someone back then chose a more fragile and more expensive tech and not really that much faster tech to archive stuff to? Why?

 

Someone made a lot of money.

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Reputator

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32 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

Who was choosing hard drives for long term storage? That's crazy. Like actually mind blowing. And these people were shipping hard drives to Iron Mountain as if they had the shelf life of tape? What? Who made these choices? Especially in the 90s. Drives then were even more much more expensive per GB and not really that much faster. Someone back then chose a more fragile and more expensive tech and not really that much faster tech to archive stuff to? Why?

 

There weren't a lot of options. Sure there was magnetic tape, as mentioned in the article, but that has its own set of issues. CD burners weren't really a thing until the end of the 90s.

 

Mechanical hard drives really are a total crapshoot. We've all had drives in our PCs go bad after a few years. And I've had drives last over ten years. The oldest working hard drive I have is one that's sitting in my IBM 5160, a machine that, in this case, was built in 1986. It was found in a garage in North Carolina amongst a giant hoarder's pile of junk, and I bought it with a stack of other old computers three years ago. It's a physically massive Seagate drive (model ST-225), only 20 megabytes in capacity, and it sounds like a turbine when it slowly starts to spin up. All I did to it was low-level format it, and it's still working perfectly with no bad sectors. It will be forty years old in a couple years.

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Ghost_MH

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36 minutes ago, Reputator said:

There weren't a lot of options. Sure there was magnetic tape, as mentioned in the article, but that has its own set of issues.

 

Magnetic tape was the only real, serious choice in the late 80s and 90s...and 00s...and 10s. I was still supporting IBM tape systems purchased in the early-90s into 99 and 2000. They weren't that much slower than the larger drives from the early and mid-90s. Even after then, if anyone was using drives to archive stuff after LTO they should be hung. That's just IT malpractice at that point.

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Uaarkson

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15 minutes ago, ort said:

Magnetic tape can also go bad. CDRs definitely go bad. There really isn’t a perfect choice for long term storage. Hard drives aren’t the worst choice, but yeah, you have to stay on top of your data if it’s important to you. 


Just smack out the binary on trillions of stone tablets.

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Ghost_MH

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14 hours ago, ort said:

Magnetic tape can also go bad. CDRs definitely go bad. There really isn’t a perfect choice for long term storage. Hard drives aren’t the worst choice, but yeah, you have to stay on top of your data if it’s important to you. 

 

Of course, but LTO will get you a few decades at Iron Mountain. I was blown away by this story, but even more so when I saw that the music industry started switching away from tape to drives after the introduction of LTO around 99/00. That's just crazy to me. Drives were known to fail in as little as a decade by that point with LTO specifically being developed to last decades.

 

13 hours ago, Greatoneshere said:

Wouldn't the smartest choice be to create new backups on better hardware every so often as time rolls on? Keep the old and new ones, update accordingly. 

 

Mostly unnecessary nowadays. I was all in on LTO right up until cheap cloud storage became a thing. Now you have Amazon AWS Glacier, Microsoft Azure Cool Blobs, Google Cloud Archive, and others. For like 90% of all industries, there's no real reason to manage your own archival storage. Just let some admin at Amazon deal with dead drives and aging hardware.

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Greatoneshere

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3 hours ago, Ghost_MH said:

Mostly unnecessary nowadays. I was all in on LTO right up until cheap cloud storage became a thing. Now you have Amazon AWS Glacier, Microsoft Azure Cool Blobs, Google Cloud Archive, and others. For like 90% of all industries, there's no real reason to manage your own archival storage. Just let some admin at Amazon deal with dead drives and aging hardware.

 

Nowadays for sure, I meant between the 1990's and now to avoid this problem though.

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Ghost_MH

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50 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

Nowadays for sure, I meant between the 1990's and now to avoid this problem though.

 

It was tape. It was always tape. Industry best practice was tape in the 90s all the way up until around 2015-2020 depending on how much data you need archived. In practice, most industries wouldn't really need to move data from one archival format to another. Even older tape still lasted a couple of decades, probably more, at places Iron Mountain. Most companies don't need to be able to pull digital archives from more than 1-2 decades ago. The biggest reason to move to newer tape formats was for increased storage.

 

The way I've managed it is move to new format, leave old tapes at Iron Mountain, and pull old tapes once a year for testing. I'm not testing the tapes, I'm testing the hardware because it's the biggest failure point and it's unlikely anyone still makes the hardware for supporting old tape formats. If you do need to keep things forever, them yes, everyone you move to a be format you'd need to pull tapes from off site and copy them to the new format.

 

Fast changing formats is why it wasn't uncommon to just archive entire computers in the 70s, 80s, and into the early 90s.

 

The only thing that makes sense with the music industry here is if they had planned to use drives as a stop gap to a new format or maybe even cloud solution and then just... didn't. Lack of funds. No interest in dedicating the man power to move. Some combination of the two left their stopgap solution as semi-permanent.

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