Hard drives (SSD, mechanical, or otherwise) for long-term music storage = no bueno

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EnochLight
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Post 12 Sep 2024

Caught this recent article about major music labels losing masters and content due to failing hard drives from the 1990's. Make sure ya'all are backing up and making redundant copies of everything you feel is important!

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09 ... are-dying/
Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying


The music industry traded tape for hard drives and got a hard-earned lesson.

One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry's vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.

Music industry publication Mix spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone's data stored on spinning disks.

"In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know," Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. "It may sound like a sales pitch, but it's not; it's a call for action."

Hard drives gained popularity over spooled magnetic tape as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the perceived downsides of tape, including deterioration from substrate separation and fire. But hard drives present their own archival problems. Standard hard drives were also not designed for long-term archival use. You can almost never decouple the magnetic disks from the reading hardware inside, so that if either fails, the whole drive dies.

There are also general computer storage issues, including the separation of samples and finished tracks, or proprietary file formats requiring archival versions of software. Still, Iron Mountain tells Mix that "If the disk platters spin and aren’t damaged," it can access the content.

But "if it spins" is becoming a big question mark. Musicians and studios now digging into their archives to remaster tracks often find that drives, even when stored at industry-standard temperature and humidity, have failed in some way, with no partial recovery option available.

“It’s so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there,” Koszela says. “Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything’s in order. And both of them are bricks.”

Entropy wins

Mix's passing along of Iron Mountain's warning hit Hacker News earlier this week, which spurred other tales of faith in the wrong formats. The gist of it: You cannot trust any medium, so you copy important things over and over, into fresh storage. "Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.," writes user abracadaniel. "Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you’d expect."

There is discussion of how SSDs are not archival at all; how floppy disk quality varied greatly between the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s; how Linear Tape-Open, a format specifically designed for long-term tape storage, loses compatibility over successive generations; how the binder sleeves we put our CD-Rs and DVD-Rs in have allowed them to bend too much and stop being readable.

Knowing that hard drives will eventually fail is nothing new. Ars wrote about the five stages of hard drive death, including denial, back in 2005. Last year, backup company Backblaze shared failure data on specific drives, showing that drives that fail tend to fail within three years, that no drive was totally exempt, and that time does, generally, wear down all drives. Google's server drive data showed in 2007 that HDD failure was mostly unpredictable, and that temperatures were not really the deciding factor.

So Iron Mountain's admonition to music companies is yet another warning about something we've already heard. But it's always good to get some new data about just how fragile a good archive really is.
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MrFigg
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Post 12 Sep 2024

Two buttons on my Balance stopped working yesterday Enoch.
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EnochLight
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Post 12 Sep 2024

MrFigg wrote:
12 Sep 2024
Two buttons on my Balance stopped working yesterday Enoch.
Aw man, that sucks! But.. not sure what that has do to with the OP?
Win 10 | Ableton Live 11 Suite |  Reason 12 | i7 3770k @ 3.5 Ghz | 16 GB RAM | RME Babyface Pro | Akai MPC Live 2 & Akai Force | Roland System 8, MX1, TB3 | Dreadbox Typhon | Korg Minilogue XD

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Loque
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Post 13 Sep 2024

Wait. Did they really thought a HD will work after 30 years laying around?

And the moon is made of cheese, yes, sure...
Reason13, Win10

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MrFigg
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Post 13 Sep 2024

EnochLight wrote:
12 Sep 2024
MrFigg wrote:
12 Sep 2024
Two buttons on my Balance stopped working yesterday Enoch.
Aw man, that sucks! But.. not sure what that has do to with the OP?
You always said it was a dead product. Now it's happened. It's dying. Like HDs. And apparently like your memory :).
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PhillipOrdonez
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Post 13 Sep 2024

MrFigg wrote:
13 Sep 2024
EnochLight wrote:
12 Sep 2024


Aw man, that sucks! But.. not sure what that has do to with the OP?
You always said it was a dead product. Now it's happened. It's dying. Like HDs. And apparently like your memory :).
Everyone’s is, at some point. :)

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MrFigg
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Post 13 Sep 2024

PhillipOrdonez wrote:
13 Sep 2024
MrFigg wrote:
13 Sep 2024


You always said it was a dead product. Now it's happened. It's dying. Like HDs. And apparently like your memory :).
Everyone’s is, at some point. :)
Yeah, and everybody's gettin' fat except Mamma Cass.
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EnochLight
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Post 13 Sep 2024

MrFigg wrote:
13 Sep 2024
You always said it was a dead product. Now it's happened. It's dying. Like HDs. And apparently like your memory :).
:lol: :puf_bigsmile:

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motuscott
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Post 13 Sep 2024

Time is coming for your data.
And your memory.
Who’s using the royal plural now baby? 🧂

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bxbrkrz
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Post 13 Sep 2024

The music industry is known for forgetting, cooking, and baking mechanicals, so no one should be too surprised.

Nothing lasts forever, no matter the format.

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MrFigg
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Post 13 Sep 2024

Ozymandias
Ozzy Osbourne
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