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Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 week ago by some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

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My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

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[-] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 76 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] frostwhitewolf@lemmy.world 27 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 16 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 5 days ago

The value of distributed redundancy

[-] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 4 points 5 days ago

Something to be said for the wfh movement too.

[-] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Oh, fuck. Prince's Vault.... God I hope the estate has a plan to preserve all of that.....

[-] curry@programming.dev 24 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 30 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] iopq@lemmy.world 14 points 6 days ago

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

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 7 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee 6 points 6 days ago

Not to mention bit rot

[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 4 points 6 days ago

The problem isn't even the hard drives, it's how they are managing them. There's not many digital data storage solutions around that you can dump into a closet for a few decades and then still read.

You have to regularly test your hard drives, so that when one fails you can take your other copy of the data and put it on a new drive.

[-] Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 15 points 6 days ago

I got four HDDs, some are almost 10 years old. They work great but I know that won't be for forever.

[-] Zementid@feddit.nl 5 points 6 days ago

I have probably lost lots of pictures die to head crash. WD especially

[-] Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 5 points 6 days ago

I only lost two HDDs in my life. Both in 2009. And yes, they were WDs

[-] Onsotumenh@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 6 days ago

The only one that didn't die because of my own fault (two externals and a laptop one sigh), was one of the infamous IBM/Hitachi Deathstars.

[-] PolarisFx@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I've had many deathstars fail.

Old sysadmin trick I was taught was to freeze the drives overnight, have used this trick on multiple occasions, but once the drive heats back up it's really dead. But you've generally got ample time to backup the drive before it dies.

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[-] art@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 6 days ago

That's the way to do it. Just keep bringing data forward even for media that sits in a drawer.

[-] Onsotumenh@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 6 days ago

You might want to look at snapraid. I've recently overhauled my own NAS and love it. It is snapshot based (so not perfect safety) but it is highly configurable and provides parity and scrubbing for corruption even with a JBOD array.

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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024

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