The music can be copied to new hard drives without any loss in quality, so why are they leaving their only copy on 30 year old hard drives?
Just following longstanding studio practice of putting the masters in a vault so you can forget about them.
They’re not used to the risks of bit rot.
A studio should be able to afford a good LTO tape drive for at least one backup copy; LTO tapes last over 30 years and suffer less from random bitrot than spinning disks. Just pay someone to spend a month duplicating the entire archive every couple of decades. And every decade you can also consolidate a bunch of tapes since the capacity has kept increasing; 18TB tapes are now available: $/MB it’s always far cheaper to use tape.
They could have done that with the drives, but today you’d have to go find an ATA IDE or old SCSI card (of you’re lucky) that’ll work on a modern motherboard.
But I’d guess their problem is more not having a process for maintaining the archives than the technology. Duplicating and consolidating hard drives once a year would have been relatively cheap, and as long as they verified checksums and kept duplicates, HDs would have been fine too.
Easy work for a digital archivist.
Music studios didn’t have those in the 1990’s.
I agree; it probably didn’t occur to them. But it was a fairly common job in IT in the 90’s. Not a career or job description, maybe, but a duty you got saddled with.
Why did the reuse old master tapes?
Money. Or the perception that there isn’t money to be gained from the replication and maintenance of the archives.
Some dude out there, smoking a bong right now, has a Flac of everything ever made. Piracy will save history
He doesn’t have the original Pro Tools 0.8 sessions with the raw takes, plugin settings, etc.
That’s the level of potential preservation we’re missing out on here. Not just the final product, not just the stems, but the full original raw takes and the mixes that made those takes into the original final products.
Wait you’re saying 30 year old drives are all dying or dead?
I, for one, am COMPLETELY shocked at this totally unexpected and impossible to plan for eventuality.
Who could possibly have known that hard drives might fail after decades?
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You have at least 10 years from when your tapes were written.
Hope the device you have to read them still works …
It’s 2024 back that shit up on a dictaphone already
I’d feel worse if they didn’t so richly deserve it.
Guess it’s time to dig out the ol’ parallel port Zip drive & copy everything to a USB stick…
I call bullshit my quantum fireball’s still truckin’
