Good article discussing problems with media storage in the music industry

[Steve Bruzonsky]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/music-industrys-1990s-hard-drives-like-all-hdds-are-dying/

 

[Ranasakawa]

They obviously should have several HDs with the audio tracks backed up. And perhaps minidisc/CDs as a second option. I have my entire CD collection now on HDs in FLAC and I have discovered several of them have failed.
I am hoping that they can come up with a better solution for storage of digital files in the near future.

 

[jimfisheye]

If you note the warranty period on hard drives and cycle in new drives on schedule as well as keep 3 copies of everything, the system is more robust than anything in the past.

Vinyl was intended as an archival format that would keep. Trying to treat a hard drive this way, clinging to it until it finally dies, will not work! (A 1990 hard drive will be 30 years out of warranty.) Tape was only ever supposed to be temporary too.

The optical discs rated at 1000 years? Maybe. There's got to be some variable left to surprise someone but this is the storage solution being offered. Otherwise you keep a hard drive system in service, backed up, and offsite backed up.

It's not intuitive like carving words into stone tablets or sound waves into vinyl. So... someone is going to lose something.

Yeah, I have some things on only two hard drives and both of them are in my house. I still have some single copy data CDRs. As well as DVDs and BDRs. So I've probably already lost something.

I used to use Protools HD before upgrading to Reaper. PT would often crash and reset disk paths to default back then. I missed it sometimes. And now I don't have the 30 tracks of overdubs to remix this song from my old band in surround because they never got backed up in the first place. Operator error is still king of screw ups!

 

[ar surround]

If you note the warranty period on hard drives and cycle in new drives on schedule as well as keep 3 copies of everything, the system is more robust than anything in the past…

Yes. Three copies: the file on the main SSD, a backup on another drive, and the source optical disc.

It’s the story, backup your stuff and back it up again and neither drive will fail. Don’t back it up and your drive will fail…’because it can’.

 

[jimfisheye]

There's an additional part where the more important or interesting a recording is the more likely it is to have a failure.

 

[DuncanS]

SSDs are going to become a problem, if the the chip interface fails you cannot recover anything from that chip. Similarly with USB FLASH drives. They all use NAND memory. I have seen NAND devices that haven't failed but have lost the data on a board - we never got to bottom of why, we did wonder if a glitch triggered the device erase function.

At least with an HDD if the disc is OK (i..e. no head crashes into it) it can be removed and read.

I suspect the best back-up is to burn to archive quality M-Discs.

 

[MidiMagic]

YOU CAN'T PUT A SPARE-TIME MUSIC COMPOSITION, RECORDING, AND PRODUCTION PROJECT ON HOLD AND THEN START IT UP AGAIN TEN YEARS LATER.​

They changed everything during those years so nothing still works.

I was writing a long musical work that I started in 1996. I did my last work on it in 2006. Then my employment situation changed, and most of my time was taken up by my new job. I also got married.

I have now retired, and wanted to start up the project again. Nothing works. Some of my equipment has failed, the old software won't work with newer operating systems, and they changed all of the standards in my absence.

1. Amazingly, my multitrack tape unit and my mixers still work.
2. They no longer sell the tape for the multitrack unit.
3. My live musicians are gone.
4. All of the computers I had been doing this work on have irreparably failed.
5. My MIDI music composition software no longer works. It ran on Windows 3.1.
6. The frequency-shift-keying on the multitrack sync track can't be read by anything now on the market.
7. My hardware MIDI controller and its software won't work on any operating system newer than Windows XP.
8. The connector for the MIDI controller interface unit doesn't exist on new computers.
9. The connector for the multitrack sync unit doesn't exist on the new computers.
10. My mastering software won't work on any operating system newer than Windows XP.
11. Both of the music keyboard units I was using for sounders have died.
12. My digital delay for the surround encoder quit. They don't make these anymore.
13. Some newer surround sound systems don't decode Dolby Surround. My mixes were made to be played on Dolby Surround.
14. Dolby Surround was the only surround sound system in use when the project started.
15. Dolby Surround is the only useful surround sound system that can be put on a CD.
16. Most newer surround sound amplifiers don't have 5.1 analog inputs. My special mixing decoder requires a 5.1 surround input.
17. My surround receiver failed. Fortunately, I was able to repair it.
18. It's hard to get stereo or surround components today.
19. They stopped selling CD-music enabled CDRs. My portable CD recorder requires them to be able to record.
20. It's getting hard to find CD recording equipment.
21. If one of my mixers failed, I might not be able to replace it. Most companies have switched over to digital mixers.

It's just gone!

Profit is more important to them than standards.
Microsoft makes more by changing standards to make the old ones obsolete.
I thought standards were supposed to be standard. They aren't, because Microsoft decided otherwise.

 

[Sonik Wiz]

YOU CAN'T PUT A SPARE-TIME MUSIC COMPOSITION, RECORDING, AND PRODUCTION PROJECT ON HOLD AND THEN START IT UP AGAIN TEN YEARS LATER.​

They changed everything during those years so nothing still works.

I was writing a long musical work that I started in 1996. I did my last work on it in 2006. Then my employment situation changed, and most of my time was taken up by my new job. I also got married.

I have now retired, and wanted to start up the project again. Nothing works. Some of my equipment has failed, the old software won't work with newer operating systems, and they changed all of the standards in my absence.

1. Amazingly, my multitrack tape unit and my mixers still work.
2. They no longer sell the tape for the multitrack unit.
3. My live musicians are gone.
4. All of the computers I had been doing this work on have irreparably failed.
5. My MIDI music composition software no longer works. It ran on Windows 3.1.
6. The frequency-shift-keying on the multitrack sync track can't be read by anything now on the market.
7. My hardware MIDI controller and its software won't work on any operating system newer than Windows XP.
8. The connector for the MIDI controller interface unit doesn't exist on new computers.
9. The connector for the multitrack sync unit doesn't exist on the new computers.
10. My mastering software won't work on any operating system newer than Windows XP.
11. Both of the music keyboard units I was using for sounders have died.
12. My digital delay for the surround encoder quit. They don't make these anymore.
13. Some newer surround sound systems don't decode Dolby Surround. My mixes were made to be played on Dolby Surround.
14. Dolby Surround was the only surround sound system in use when the project started.
15. Dolby Surround is the only useful surround sound system that can be put on a CD.
16. Most newer surround sound amplifiers don't have 5.1 analog inputs. My special mixing decoder requires a 5.1 surround input.
17. My surround receiver failed. Fortunately, I was able to repair it.
18. It's hard to get stereo or surround components today.
19. They stopped selling CD-music enabled CDRs. My portable CD recorder requires them to be able to record.
20. It's getting hard to find CD recording equipment.
21. If one of my mixers failed, I might not be able to replace it. Most companies have switched over to digital mixers.

It's just gone!

Profit is more important to them than standards.
Microsoft makes more by changing standards to make the old ones obsolete.
I thought standards were supposed to be standard. They aren't, because Microsoft decided otherwise.

Damn. You are maybe the most OCD person on this forum. Most of us have enjoyed the advancements in audio/ video since 1980 but that's where you live to dwell. Such a shame.

Seriously don't you ever get tired of ranting & raving about the same old thing?

 

[pat bateman]

I feel bad for the technically ignorant who got told their HDDs could last forever being put in a drawer. But just the root of how something mechanical with electronics works, you can't expect anything to just fire right up after sitting for 30 years. If it does, you are lucky. The data from those drives should have been copied on 3 different HDDs, 1 of which would be off site and done every 2-3 years with new drives. At best, they should have had RAID arrays with checksum file systems, but I give the industry a pass because of cost. In 2000, storage was $12 per GB. Now it can be had for $12 per TB. Yes, storage costs were 1,000x more expensive than today. Kinda crazy. That being said, if I see this same article in another 20-30 years, thats when I would call the loss of data just pure incompetence.

For 30K, in today's market you can build a 1 petabyte storage system. Following the 3-2-1 backup rule, let's round up to 100K cost. That would archive 52K albums presuming a 20GB file size - which someone else tell me who knows more - is that file size being generous or are the file sizes larger?

PS - this article which is almost the same, says only 20% are failing. Thats actually pretty impressive, again for a hard drive just sitting in cold storage for 30 years.

 

[jimfisheye]

Yeah, you can't just leave an ADAT deck or DAT deck sitting for 20 years unused and expect them to still work either. Ask me how I know.

Anyone claiming you can put HDDs or SSDs in a drawer as a backup for any length is trolling.

Take over your computer. Keep copies of all OS installers and all important app installers. Know how to install from the ground up. Clone your system drive for a backup of your installed and dialed in system and installed apps. Clone data drives too. Don't pick and choose files and folders... clone whole volumes. Stuff from over 20 years ago where you don't have a CPU/system to load the OS to can be emulated.

You can keep useful software tools in service for a very long time! Still patting myself on the back for being able to be a hero and recover a clients MIDI sequences from an older Roland keyboard that only talks to older MacOS simply by rebooting into the Snow Leopard partition on my laptop. You can do this with any OS and keep your stuff running.

This is fully on you as the operator! Especially now with all the software spoofing and blacklisting being in vogue.

Learn a couple new tracks though. I edit in a DAW now. I don't keep stubbornly editing between pairs of ADAT decks anymore even though I was pretty good at it. Props to those tape transports! Now that I think about it. Hmmm... Yeah, that probably has something to do with the troubled one, doesn't it. Anyway, learn a few new tricks and learn how to wrestle your computers. Computers make for great recording, production, and storage devices.

 

[timothyemerson]

A pair and a spare I says.

I cycle through my drives using all of them so nothing's left sitting for long periods. Sectors can still go kaput but whatchagonnado?

Hope they can improve data transfer speeds and checking/accuracy. I recently had to move ~3TB music (I don't got no NAS - just 4TB HDDs) and it was a time-consuming task but I'm glad I did it cos I learned a few things.