Data archiving specialist Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services says that they are seeing about a 20% failure rate on reading digital music data stored on hard drives from the ’90s.
“There are historic sessions from the early to mid-’90s that are dying, notes Iron Mountain’s Robert Koszela.
Mix reports:
Of the thousands and thousands of archived hard disk drives from the 1990s that clients ask the company to work on, around one-fifth are unreadable. Iron Mountain has a broad customer base, but if you focus strictly on the music business, says Robert Koszela, Global Director Studio Growth and Strategic Initiatives, “That means there are historic sessions from the early to mid-’90s that are dying.”
For the past 25 or more years, the music industry has been focused on its magnetic tape archives, and on the remediation, digitization and migration of assets to more accessible, reliable storage. Hard drives also became a focus of the industry during that period, ever since the emergence of the first DAWs in the late 1980s. Iron Mountain wants to alert the music industry at large to the fact that, even though you may have followed recommended best practices at the time, those archived drives may now be no more easily playable than a 40-year-old reel of Ampex 456 tape.
“The big challenge that we face is just getting the word out there,” says Koszela, who racked up years of experience on the record label side with UMG before joining Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services. Iron Mountain handles millions of data storage assets for a diverse list of clients, from Fortune 500 companies to major players in the entertainment industry, so the company has a significant sample size to analyze, he points out. “In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know. It may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not; it’s a call for action.”
Do you have a plan for reliably archiving your music? Share what you’re doing in the comments!
One immutable rule of all storage media is that it will eventually crap out. I have safety/listening cassettes I made of many of my 80s-90s LPs, to preserve them from scratches and gunk. They mostly sound surprisingly good.
By contrast, I’ve upgraded through floppies to iffy hard disks and then transferred everything I digitized to flash drives and SSDs. You can get hilarious amounts of storage for chump change, so its easy to do. Again: data not copied to at least three other places doesn’t really exist. I have about six, one layer partially being safety CDs I burned as I worked.
Flash drives can misfire like any other medium, but I have several USB 1.0 drives that still read properly. So far, they’re beating spinning platters easily. Arthur C. Clarke said the ultimate machine would have no moving parts. Hey, I have 8 of those! Cool.
Absolutely! I have data from decades past but it is maintained and transferred to ever newer drives. Storage is cheaper than hamburger now.
Sounds like a sales pitch! Old harddrives are more reliable than they imply! But of course it is always good to do regular backups of important music or data!
Magnetism doesn’t last forever. So these old drives – even lying in a drawer – will fade out eventually.
Naw man…bit rot is real. Go do some reading on the subject.
Pulled a couple of NOS business class workstations to replace some failed units and the drives had seized on the un-used NOS units. This is an issue with un-used HDD that is more and more likely to occur as the years go on. Drives were meant to be used, like cars.
Only a dummy keeps their backups in a single media
Spot on!
I think each generation of media extends longevity, but users over-estimate it. With various mechanical or electromagnetic media, there can be degradation without total loss.
With digital storage, there can be errors, or there can be complete file corruption. I guess data recovery people can work some very expensive magic but there are limits.
Many assumed incorrectly that optical media like CD/DVD-ROM’s would last indefinitely.
Does anyone know about new tech for long-lasting archival storage media?
I loosely expect some kind of science-fiction, crystal-based format, but a stumbling assistant in the factory will still knock over a whole rack of them and POOF. If the medium doesn’t fail on its own, humans always step up. You know we will!
test is right: multiple copies across different media = basic common sense. My cassettes, flash drives & 95% of my CDs have all been super-solid, so I’ll take the magic of my era and say thanks.
i have a big box of Zip disks from the 90s, the samples to every production i made in the 90s on the Akai S1000 was on them. Recently i loaded them all off successfully. Zip disks always were and are still cool.
Hahaha, nice! Thank you for sharing.
Ironically, HDDs have been more reliable than CDs for me. 300+ music CDs went into an upstairs cupboard that is on the sunny side of the house. I wasn’t aware of CD degradation and over a hot spell lost some irreplaceable CDs. A 14 year old USB-HDD saved the day fortunately. Unfortunately many of us don’t take storage seriously until we have a loss. Photos, music and important documents now get backed up across multiple computers and on multiple backup drives. I now automate regular and multiple backups via software to a mixture of solid state and regular hard drives. In a similar vein. I don’t think enough discussion goes on about strategies for protecting PCs/Macs from OS screw-ups. I recently followed a purchased course from a Cubase certified training centre. The course required installing multiple free plugins. This has never caused a problem with past courses but this time it I had to do a reinstall of Ventura. I still have to go through the laborious process of DAW and plugin installation. It will be several days work. Computers allow us to do incredible things but they are at risk of becoming a scorpion on our backs – not helped by security restrictions imposed by manufacturers that prevent a bootable OS copy to be made.
Another consideration in backing-up data is to have it co-located. This means taking one of those storage medium backups to a different physical site and/or storing it in the “cloud”/internet. The reason is in the case of theft or damage to your property, you have the information stored elsewhere for retrieval. If the data is important enough, having all three options (local, physical remote and cloud) with regularly scheduled updates is key to knowing your data is safe.
The real secret is make your music so catchy that no one will ever forget it.