The digital archiving nightmare

[MikeRivers]

 

if you're looking to make a time capsule and bury behind town hall, by all means bury an analog tape. I just wouldn't consider that a realistic form of "backing up." Inherent in the concept of secure back ups is some kind of archival oversight and activity, which is exactly what the Library of Congress is dealing with.

 

"Backup" and "archive" are terms that are often used interchangeably but have different meanings. A backup is for while you're working, should you need it. An archive is for reference, when you need it.

 

The rub is that some people (and Jeff pointed this out) consider that a project is never finished, and therefore you always need a working copy and therefore, a backup. If your work is always in progress, you don't need an archive. Once it's archived, it's frozen. You create a new copy of the original work from the archive, you don't create a new work from it. But sometimes you don't know that what you thought was an "archive copy" has become a "working backup" until you decide to work on it again.

[MikeRivers]

So, Mike Rivers might ask, why not just record new music? Because it's 2AM in Anaheim and I have six videos to upload before I go to sleep. I copy a bunch of old stuff over to a DVD-ROM before I go to a trade show, and I have plenty of potential soundtrack music.

Or you could do what I do, just write text, maybe include a still picture, and let the reader use his imagination. I always liked radio better than television, because the pictures I saw were better.

 

No criticism of your music, but frankly, I think the music behind your show videos is annoying, and wish you just narrated to the pictures. Though I suppose it serves a useful purpose of covering up most of the background noise that you can't get away from on the show floor.

[MrKnobs]

 

The analog tapes will be a sticky mess, the machines to play them will be run down antiques with no replacement parts available, and the digital copies will sound the same as the day they were made, assuming whatever organization responsible for the backups practiced due diligence.

 

 

This.

 

I'm presently cleaning house on decades of work, both analog and digital. I have analog tapes, digital tapes, hard drives, CDRs, and DVDs. The tapes more than 10 years old are mostly the sticky mess Philter describes (despite careful storage) and the machines used to play them (which were put away in perfect working order after being refurbusihed by the manufacturer) a malfuctioning nightmare due to sticky electromechanical parts and intermittent connectors and solder joints.

 

By contrast, the CDRs (which were 1x and used the crappy older dyes) are still working perfectly. The stored hard drives are also, though to be fair they're not nearly as old. The DVDRs still scare me, as there's just too much information in too small an area.

 

The lesson going forward for me is that I will slow burn everything onto premium CDRs and store them on the airless dark side of the moon. I now hate tape and electromechanical storage with a passion.

 

Terry D.

[Jeff da Weasel]

I'm assuming you folks read the article and are aware that this topic isn't about digital vs. analog, right?

[mcmike100]

 

Try to find someone with one of those Akai 12 track analog decks that were supposedly going to revolutionize multitrack recording. Is the difficulty of doing so a problem endemic to analog technology?.

 

 

At least Akai came out with a statement, well after the end of life for those recorders, that they would support the tape format for ten years. And they continued the tape supply for that period.

[Jeff da Weasel]

True.

[mcmike100]

 

Well, I didn't know that. I mentioned Syquests because at the time, all graphic designers I knew seemed to be using these. So I was listing this, not as an archaic bizarre format, but one that appeared to be popular (unlike the Akai, which was doomed from the start!!!).

 

 

I should have read this whole thread before responding. I was the product manager for all Akai products back when the MG1212 and MG1214 were out. I never ever heard anybody talking about them as archival recorders. They were simply a nice sounding recorder at the time, targeted at someone who would want a high-end portastudio. This is the first conversation where I have ever heard anyone refer to them as an archival medium. Contrary to popular belief, it was a huge success saleswise and really helped start the Akai Professional brand name.

 

Sony had nothing to do with the Akai 12-track recorder. The tapes were manufactured by TDK. I'm not sure why anyone would think Sony had anything to do with it. They were rivals of Akai.

 

Mike McRoberts

[Jeff da Weasel]

True.

[Lee Flier]

Good Lord.

[Jeff da Weasel]

[blue2blue]

150 years from now, all the Ampex, Studer, Otari, MCI, etc. machines will probably be part of the environment. But assuming that you know that you have a magnetic tape recording of an audio program, with some assumptions (like you have a pretty good idea of what it should sound like, which, admittedly, may be difficult with some music unless you can find some examples on other media that are still playable) you could reverse engineer and build a machine to play it. You know the size, you can determine the track format, the speed, and required frequency response. What more do you need other than a good machinist, a good electronics engineer, and some good taste? Due to the nature of things computer, I doubt that there will be sufficient documentation surviving to build a CD player. And it would be highly unlikely that one would be able to reverse engineer a CD player from a CD even if it survived the elements for 100 years. For a fiction example, read the short story "Time Shards" by Gregory Benford . It's only half a buck, and it has one of my favorite lines in it: "We should have bought the Hewlett-Packard."

Mike -- surely you are not suggesting that a technology that has dominated popular music distribution for more than a quarter century and for which many hundreds of millions of playback units have been manufactured, and billions of quite straightforward media disks* have been produced and spread around the globe, will be not just forgotten but beyond the capability of future technologists to figure out and decode...

 

* binary info, serially laid out in pits and lands -- even if one only read the pits, he'd have an 8 bit representation of the data stream -- which one of the reasons NASA scientists felt sending a single music CD to a nearby star system might actually make some vague slice of sense, likely recognizing it as a coherent signal of some sort... Of course, without knowing the proper playback speed, Robert Johnson might end up sounding like Barry White...

[bp]

 

Different machine. The 1630 was the standard format for sending a master to a pressing plant back in that day. The Beta setup came along later when he started getting mixes in that format for mastering.

 

 

I should have specified that when I first went to is place, he had an older U-matic machine. He used it to master a live CD I had recorded direct to stereo on an early Sony DAT machine I had purchased while touring in Japan in 1987.

[blue2blue]

 

"Backup" and "archive" are terms that are often used interchangeably but have different meanings. A backup is for while you're working, should you need it. An archive is for reference, when you need it. The rub is that some people (and Jeff pointed this out) consider that a project is never finished, and therefore you always need a working copy and therefore, a backup. If your work is always in progress, you don't need an archive. Once it's archived, it's frozen. You create a new copy of the original work from the archive, you don't create a new work from it. But sometimes you don't know that what you thought was an "archive copy" has become a "working backup" until you decide to work on it again.

 

 

And that distinction, of course, is absolutely critical to making sense of what will likely be the single biggest problem for cultural historians and archeologists of the future.

 

Not having too little stored information but too much.

 

 

Barring some eschatological disaster movie coming true, of course.

[Lee Flier]

So far, properly stored papyrus and clay tablets have been shown to survive for thousands of years;

 

Good point, although I guess it could get expensive trying to store binary data on clay tablets.

[spokenward]

not so much...

 

Blind Willie Johnson not Robert...

 

and about the digital thing...

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html

 

* binary info, serially laid out in pits and lands -- even if one only read the pits, he'd have an 8 bit representation of the data stream -- which one of the reasons NASA scientists felt sending a single music CD to a nearby star system might actually make some vague slice of sense, likely recognizing it as a coherent signal of some sort... Of course, without knowing the proper playback speed, Robert Johnson might end up sounding like Barry White...

[blue2blue]

This. I'm presently cleaning house on decades of work, both analog and digital. I have analog tapes, digital tapes, hard drives, CDRs, and DVDs. The tapes more than 10 years old are mostly the sticky mess Philter describes (despite careful storage) and the machines used to play them (which were put away in perfect working order after being refurbusihed by the manufacturer) a malfuctioning nightmare due to sticky electromechanical parts and intermittent connectors and solder joints. By contrast, the CDRs (which were 1x and used the crappy older dyes) are still working perfectly. The stored hard drives are also, though to be fair they're not nearly as old. The DVDRs still scare me, as there's just too much information in too small an area. The lesson going forward for me is that I will slow burn everything onto premium CDRs and store them on the airless dark side of the moon. I now hate tape and electromechanical storage with a passion. Terry D.

As I noted, spot checks of my 150 or so reel tapes were fairly depressing.

 

I got my first CD-R in '96 and started burning archives and backups soon after. (At first, the high cost of a blank -- as much as $18 each -- made me restrict it to archives and a couple of audio disks.) I have had a few CD-ROMs go bad but a couple years ago I went through ALL my CD-R and DVD data disks and cataloged them (using CD-Tree Pro which is a wee bit funky but works pretty well and was about the only program I found that really did what you'd want a disk catalog software to do -- doesn't anyone else catalog their disks?) Out of 77 archive disks going back to '96, I think I had 3 that were hinky and I was able to make safety copies of 2 of those. Since I'm pretty obsessive about multiple copies and even archiving work stems and such, I don't think I actually lost any meaningful data.

 

 

That said, where I have seen disk failures is in the sometimes pathetically cheap disks I occasionally used in my set top DVD recorder (which did yeoman work burning something like 1200 DVDs and doing huge amounts of playback before finally developing CD tray logic/operation issues). Most of the disks (all within maybe 4-5 years old) are fine -- but some of those ridiculously cheap disks had a protective layer so thin that they got gouged out just in normal use (which, admittedly, is a little rougher for entertainment DVDs around here than for archival CDs). Obviously, a hole in the photoreactive layer is a deal-killer right off. And, with bits of coating peeling off, not even something you want to put in a machine.

[blue2blue]

 

I'm assuming you folks read the article and are aware that this topic isn't about digital vs. analog, right?

Digital vs Analog is the defining fight of our generation!

 

It's all about Digital vs Analog.

[the stranger]

I'm assuming you folks read the article and are aware that this topic isn't about digital vs. analog, right?

 

I'm assuming you know that forum threads are always subject to multiple interpretations and can go through endless variations completely unrelated to anything in particular?

[the stranger]

Mike -- surely you are not suggesting that a technology that has dominated popular music distribution for more than a quarter century and for which many hundreds of millions of playback units have been manufactured, and billions of quite straightforward media disks* have been produced and spread around the globe, will be not just forgotten but beyond the capability of future technologists to figure out and decode... * binary info, serially laid out in pits and lands -- even if one only read the pits, he'd have an 8 bit representation of the data stream -- which one of the reasons NASA scientists felt sending a single music CD to a nearby star system might actually make some vague slice of sense, likely recognizing it as a coherent signal of some sort... Of course, without knowing the proper playback speed, Robert Johnson might end up sounding like Barry White...

 

I liked how he considered tape to be automatically figure-out-able by some future beings, yet they wouldn't be able to figure out a CDR, since "you know how computers are". Mike loves computers.

[Jeff da Weasel]

I'm assuming you know that forum threads are always subject to multiple interpretations and can go through endless variations completely unrelated to anything in particular?

 

I'm assuming many people here are on anti-psychotic meds, and tend to forget to take them occasionally.

[the stranger]

Good point, although I guess it could get expensive trying to store binary data on clay tablets.

 

Maybe not, with current laser technology they could etch in the binary info at the subatomic level. And then store them in big stone pyramids, which is proven to give you at the least ten thousand years or more.

[the stranger]

I'm assuming many people here are on anti-psychotic meds, and tend to forget to take them occasionally.

 

[the stranger]

Digital vs Analog is the defining fight of our generation ! It's all about Digital vs Analog.

 

This.

[blue2blue]

I'm assuming many people here are on anti-psychotic meds, and tend to forget to take them occasionally.

Why would you want to take anti-psychotic meds? Back in the day, we used to pay good money to get this way...

[MikeRivers]

I have analog tapes, digital tapes, hard drives, CDRs, and DVDs. The tapes more than 10 years old are mostly the sticky mess Philter describes (despite careful storage) and the machines used to play them (which were put away in perfect working order after being refurbusihed by the manufacturer) a malfuctioning nightmare due to sticky electromechanical parts and intermittent connectors and solder joints. By contrast, the CDRs (which were 1x and used the crappy older dyes) are still working perfectly.

Well, then, get those tape decks out of storage, bake the tapes, play them (once) and transfer them to 1x CDs.

 

Maybe you can donate them to the Library of Congress.