Inside Iron Mountain: It’s Time to Talk About Hard Drives - Mixonline
By Steve Harvey. Iron Mountain sounds the alarm: Aging tracks created through an all-digital workflow aren't guaranteed to play back.
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📣 News Now the Iron Mountain hard drives are starting to fail.
- Thread starter Harry
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Bobberman
Well-Known Member
Moral of the story in my opinion "Hold on to everything you have and take the best care of everything as possible regardless of physical and Digital forms which is what I've been doing all along I've heard people say " They will always be available in some form" but after the Universal fire and now this story I am more convinced most of my collection is going to become non replaceable in the years to come. It's pretty sad that this is even happening. This will make the Universal fire look seem like small potatoes.
Murray
Well-Known Member
Seems that nothing digital is forever, and music is only one area of concern. One of my hobbies is photography... with film cameras, you had prints and negatives, that could reasonably be expected to last for many decades. With digital cameras, your precious memories could be all gone in an instant... hard drive failure, memory card failure, power surge. Bit rot over time could make the files unreadable. Important photos should be printed, on archival paper, with archival inks, and stored in acid-free sleeves, in a cool, dark, dry location. But how may people print photos anymore? They view them on their phone screens, or maybe on their TV. The kids of today may not be able to show their childhood photos to their children...
Rotten vinyl? Or Vinyl rot?
GDBY2LV
Well-Known Member
Bobberman
Well-Known Member
Thankfully I avoided the so called cloud I never trusted it to begin with and this just confirms my suspicionsAnd remember, if you're all backed up to the "cloud":
Not quite how that works...And remember, if you're all backed up to the "cloud":
All of my digital photos (except for one set of files I'm still search for) are backed up in multiple places. They won't be lost. (See below.)
Vinyl doesn't wear that quickly unless there's an issue with the stylus incorrectly mounted, or it's damaged or worn itself. A stylus tip should last about 1,000 hours before it needs replacement. That said, Universal is known to send pressing to the lowest bidder so that's no surprise they are noisy right out of the box. Dirt/dust will cause them to get noisier but I have noticed that if I've only listened to something a few times, I may notice a flaw on later playings that might have been there previously.
Pressing quality was the #1 reason I didn't buy that box set--I knew it would be low quality. And since I'd only listen to 3 or 4 albums anyway, it made no sense. I bought Horizon to see if it was all that bad and yep, it was--the surfaces were noisy, and one side was off-center. Good job Universal. 🙄
The cloud should be part of everyone's robust backup plan. I store all of my important files in the cloud--all documents past and present, all photos I've taken (DSLRs, portables, all phones I've ever had), scans, irreplaceable audio and video files, they're all backed up to the cloud. I can have them backed up in a couple places here (such as, on two different NAS boxes I use on my network) but what happens in the event of a catastrophe? Our weather has changed so much in the past few decades and especially lately that we could get 5-6 inches of rain in a short time and our basement would flood.
Clouds have major redundancy in place so that the data is distributed across multiple storage units. It's not like uploading to a remote sever which itself can fail. I have my computers, phones, tablets, etc. tied to my OneDrive account so any file I work on is automatically saved to the cloud. If I ever lose a computer or device, I've lost no data whatsoever.
Just a general note though...
Iron Mountain is as inept as Universal. Hard drives are meant to be used, not written to once and stored. And if they are "experts" at storage, they should know that having only one copy of data is not a "backup." For analog tape, even if you transfer it to digital as Sony has done, you still hold onto the analog tape. (Not roast them in a fire like Universal does.) Iron Mountain should have their own Azure cloud stack to back up every digital item in their possession. Yet...it's just another corporation pinching pennies to keep their 1%-er board members' stock prices up.
The smart major labels never get rid of the originals. As for analog copies, that ship has sailed. Production masters, safeties, etc. aren't as valuable as the original two-track master, so I don't know if all of those are saved, or perhaps only an essential safety they deem necessary is kept. Digital is being used as the backup medium only, and for digital releases, the digital backup of course is used as the source for just about all of them.
For the oddball like Herb Alpert's Rise, it was recorded to a crude early digital multitrack (and sounds it!) but mixed down to 2-track analog tape. The problem with some of these old digital systems is that there will come a time when the equipment to play back some of those oddly-formatted digital tapes no longer exists. Back then, they didn't use 24-bit/96kHz as a studio standard; instead, they had odd bitrates and sampling rates. Fagen's Nightfly was recorded with a 50kHz sampling rate, for instance (the Soundstream digital system, IIRC).
And a lot of the digital tape did not fare so well over the years either. Like the Sony 1630 U-matic digital tapes from the early CD era (where this format was sometimes used to send a digital master for a CD to the CD manufacturing facility where a glass master was made). Tape durability was not good. DAT, for instance, is notorious for being a flaky format; even between individual players, there is no guarantee a DAT recorded on one deck will play back properly on another. I ran into that myself. Got sent a handful of DATs to put online for a band and they were mostly unplayable.
In the case of audio, analog tapes are actually the more durable medium in terms of the media itself. Aside from the trainwreck of the Ampex 456 sticky-shed issue, there are tapes decades old that still play. They might have decades of degradation. Some of the degradation is so small that the tapes sound nearly as good today as they did when first recorded, but others degrade more, and some may develop a few dropouts. But still...that tape is playable, even in degraded form. A dropout on a digital tape is lost data, usually not recoverable. A scratch on a vinyl record is a "pop" through a speaker; the wrong scratch on a CD can make it unplayable. Makes you rethink what is important for backing up the world's vast music library.
X 1000. 👍
We only have ourselves to blame if we lose our data because it's stored only in one place. I pointed out just above how I use a OneDrive account as my backup for the physical backups I have on hand at home. For documents, my desktop and two laptops have the files stored on them, but they are automatically synced as my software auto-saves the files. It's completely hands-off--it's no separate step I have to remember to do every so often. If my laptop's SSD were to fail completely? Who cares? I just replaced the SSD or the entire laptop, install my OS and software, re-sync my files from OneDrive, and I've lost nothing. OneDrive is a service, so the data is redundant on their end as well and not saved across any one storage device. Hence, it's a true "cloud." Failure of any one device doesn't affect end users at all--automatic failover assures the service continues running, and they could theoretically "hot swap" new hardware into the system and nobody is the wiser.
I have a mirror for my OneDrive on one of my two NAS boxes, so I still have the files on a completely separate device in the home network, in case Internet is not available. I use SSDs, so, no moving parts, no mechanical failures. SSDs can weaken over time with multiple write operations, but in my case, these are a write once/read many operation so wear is minimized. (For my surveillance system, I use a cheap, small 1TB SSD that I consider "disposable" and can replace it, losing nothing important, if it develops too many errors.) For a simple home backup, I'd recommend anyone get a 1TB SSD (they are inexpensive) and save backups to it. Even better is to get a second one, copy the backup SSD to it, and store it at someone else's house or stick it in a safe deposit box. Or again...OneDrive (and other cloud data storage services--there are a handful of good ones) are cheap enough these days.
I'm pretty well covered.
Vinylalbumcovers
Ah am so steel een luv weeth yoo
The early digital tape is not faring well at all. The DASH format was NOT a good idea and time is showing that. Ditto on ADAT, DAT, and the others. When analog tape gets sticky shed, you can save it through baking in almost all cases. It contains analog signal and even if a little bit of oxide flakes off, the signal can still be pretty good. If digital tape suffers oxide lost, it's over. The digital "0s and 1s" are on the tape and that's the sound. If those go, you get total signal loss.
Ed
I remember ADAT being flaky, but DAT was probably the worst I've ever used. The Sony deck I owned had issues with the loading door and, after being in storage at home for several years, quit working completely for no reason.
I actually found that the DDS data backup tapes, which were the same physical format as DAT, were more reliable and also slightly less costly. For any of my DAT tapes though, I have no idea if any of them are any good. Thankfully nothing important was recorded on them, except for one or two live concerts I grabbed from the radio during the jazz festival.
And while I only knew someone with ADAT (I never owned one personally--for those unaware, it was an 8-channel multitrack digital recording format), my only experience with it was buying surplus ADAT tapes, as they were the same tape format as S-VHS, and a lot cheaper. They worked really well for the short time I used S-VHS.
I actually found that the DDS data backup tapes, which were the same physical format as DAT, were more reliable and also slightly less costly. For any of my DAT tapes though, I have no idea if any of them are any good. Thankfully nothing important was recorded on them, except for one or two live concerts I grabbed from the radio during the jazz festival.
And while I only knew someone with ADAT (I never owned one personally--for those unaware, it was an 8-channel multitrack digital recording format), my only experience with it was buying surplus ADAT tapes, as they were the same tape format as S-VHS, and a lot cheaper. They worked really well for the short time I used S-VHS.
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