"Backup discipline" is tedious, frustrating, costly… and it is the only alternative. If we don't protect our information periodically, storage media will betray us sooner or later. Unfortunately, Iron Mountain explains that the music industry is already feeling the first effects: 20 percent of the many hard drives stored in the late '90s have completely failed, a deterioration that puts unique and irreplaceable material at risk.
We have said it more than once: hard drives are not immortal. That same condition applies to solid-state drives, memory cards, tapes, and optical discs. Our main goal as users is to always avoid the point of crisis, that moment when we discover the information is unreadable. No industry can escape this, and although it may seem unbelievable, the music universe has begun to suffer the agony of hard drives firsthand:
Archiving music, and the challenge of hard drives
MixOnline explains that before the turn of the century, releasing new tracks followed a relatively linear process: the multitrack was mixed, the two-track master went to vinyl, cassette, or CD-ROM, and the original tapes were stored. With the 21st century came new technologies like Surround 5.1 releases and the Guitar Hero franchise. When the owners of the material went to retrieve the tapes for re-release in those new formats, they discovered that they were falling apart, and many decided (over the last 25 years) to transfer the content to hard drives.
However, Bob Koszela, "Global Director Studio Growth and Strategic Initiatives" at Iron Mountain, warns that hard drives are following the same path. Koszela mentions that the owners of all that musical material feel safe knowing the drives were stored in a climate-controlled environment, but they are still susceptible to a great number of failures. In fact, he points out that it is "very sad" to see a project enter the studio, with the hard drives (original and backup) in their original packaging, labels intact… and both out of commission.
The interview contains other details such as the difficulties when cataloging all that information, but Koszela's final message is clear: "People need to know that their hard drives are dying." The only successful long-term storage is none other than successive short- and medium-term storage. Backups, backups, backups.
Sources: MixOnline, Tom's Hardware
