How to Keep Music for Forty Years?

Pinky3 asks: "I recently started digitizing my reel-to-reel music tapes. Most are thirty to forty years old (the first was recorded in 1964). How confident are you that the music you are collecting today will still be playable in forty years? What strategies are you adopting to keep your music safe?" "I am starting to get worried about having all my music on one 200 GB hard disk. Like most of us, I have had a hard drive die on me in the past. At an Apple store last month a sad young man was in a panic because he had purchased lots of music from the iTunes Music Store while at work. He lost his job, so he made sure all his music was on his iPod. When his iPod died the next month, he lost everything (yes, he should have made a data backup to CD or DVD). At least when one of my tapes deteriorated, I lost only the music on that one tape. Will you be keeping a single repository or writing everything back onto multiple CDs? We all know to keep backups, but we also know that few of us do. Is all your music backed up? In my case, many of my tapes were backups of my long playing records, but they are gone now too.

Another issue is format, both physical and electronic. I am able to play forty year old tapes because I have kept the equipment needed (a 30 year old Tandberg tape deck). (Aside: after announcing that they would no longer produce tape, Quantegy was sold and has begun producing tape again. The initial announcement of the end of production was covered earlier on Slashdot).

I no longer have a 5.25 inch floppy drive, so even if I had kept old floppies, I wouldn't be able to get the data off. I am pretty sure that CDs and DVDs will not be the current media for music in 2045. Are you planning on keeping old players just for your music? Or will you copy everything onto each new format as it appears?

If you are keeping your music on a hard drive, are you ready to copy everything over to a new hard drive every four or five years? Also, what electronic format are you using? Are you confident that (name your favorite format) will still be supported in 2045?

Although I don't expect to be alive another forty years, I would not like to lose my music before I die."

Comments

music == any other data

[yotto]

If you want to keep it, back it up as many times and as frequently as you feel is necessary. For me, for my music, this means having it on two hard drives and a lot of it burned to CD.

Do I plan on using these hard drives for 40 years? Of course not. If something better comes along I'll convert what I have now to the new format (Like how mp3s came along and replaced CDs for me, I converted the CDs that I liked to mp3). I'll do this as many times as is necessary until I kick the bucket, hopefully a bit more than 40 years from now.

Only one thing you can do

[booch]

Copy it over to the latest and greatest technology available. That's about all you can do. Once it's in digital format, that becomes quite a bit easier; you can automate any conversions, and you don't have to lose any information. (No more loss of resolution due to multi-generation copies.) And copying from an old hard disk to a new one is simple. (I've copied my data from drive to drive over several generations of PCs.)

As for backups, I currently suggest DVDs stored off-site. With long-term data like music, you really only need to make one backup, not every week or anything. Although you should test restoring the off-site backups at least once a year.

Re:Only one thing you can do

[lpq]

With some commercial quality DVD's having been known to "delaminate" after 3-5 years, how long would one expect a home-burned DVD to last?

Longevity of CD-R's has been studied, and a preliminary government study of DVD-CD lifetimes indicates that you should keep multiple copies, check the media for errors annually and create new dups as bit rot occurs. This is also mentioned in this article on archival life for DVD's.

There doesn't seem to be a single method that is known to last 20 years. Of note, optimal storage conditions for optical media is 50-59 degrees F or 10-15C. That's a bit cooler than your average living space and certainly cooler than "human-optimal" office temperatures of around 77F (vs. the 68F "standard" adopted for heating during the first energy crisis).

Re:Not too difficult

[Cuthalion]

Burn high quality CDs at slow speeds for deeper pits

This isn't how CDR media works at all. Instead of burning pits in the aluminum foil (which isn't how mass produced cds are made either; the substrate is injection molded w/ pits & lands and then the foil is mashed onto that rough surface) the laser's heat causes a state change in dye. (Reference)

The only thing burn speed really affects is mechanical precision.

Long Now Foundation

[Anonymous Coward]

The Long Now Foundation has done some thinking about these issues. It appears that part of the solution is to engrave everything onto a 2" metal disk.

It might be pricey, but wouldn't it be worth it for your 400th great grand-children to be able to listen to your New Kids on the Block collection?

Library of Congress' advice for preservation

[Mikito]

The Library of Congress has a webpage that details how to preserve all sorts of collections. Many of us have extensive collections not of just music but also books, photographs, etc., and preservation can be just as important as duplication.

The way of the Do-do

[g0bshiTe]

As music formats, medium, ad nauseum goes the way of the Do-do, I imagine you will have to convert between new formats. Take mp3 for example, how many of us convert from mp3 to ogg? This will not change if you should wish to preserve them. I am quite sure you will no doubt hold on to your r-to-r for acoustics you just can not reproduce. Some will claim you can not tell the difference others will swear it isn't the same. Grab a remastered copy of Billie Holiday and have a listen vs. an LP. Some is enjoy the crackling and popping of an album.

As for your issue about backing them up, by all means do. If you have to convert between the new file formats I think it is a small price to pay in order to preserve your music. As for the electronic back ups, I suggest a raid array to prevent hd loss, this may seem extreme to some people, a raid just to preserve music. Though if this guy has taken this much care to maintain his collection this long I am sure he would go the extra mile. Also with harddrives as inexpensive as they are now, and most newer motherboards supporting some type of raid out of the box, you could bring this to fruit for a few hundred dollars.