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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."
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."
And given the fact that I can still find a SNOBOL compiler on the net, I'm assuming I'll be okay for a while (until my hearing goes, and then, oh well...)
I'm using multiple Linksys NSLU2's, an embedded linux box designed to be an Bring Your Own USB Disk file server. Out of the box it only provides SMB file sharing, but mine are running the opensource unslung firmware to give me full control over the system.
I'm doing my backups via automated rsync over ssh, to multiple boxes in multiple locations. Each box has a pair of 250G USB disks, and I'm doing a two stage rsync, a remote to local sync, and a disk to disk sync, with the disk to disk rsync being configured to ignore existing files, so if I get corrupt data on the master server, the first tier of backups will get corrupted as well, but the second tier won't.
Cost per location: $90 for the NSLU2, $160 per disk. Total of just over $400. Compared to the other NAS options out there, a pretty good price. I expect to replace the disks when I see the first round of failures, and I'm hoping the nas box will last 3-4 years. At that point it'll be time to look for the latest tech to use.
Forget offline archives. Keep everything "on-line" ie. on an active HDD. When you upgrade your HDD, it's a simple matter of moving everything across & convert formats if something better has arrived (use lossless formats when dealing with the master copy of anything).
The format and longevity of your backups is now not an issue. They only have to last one backup cycle. The physical medium doesn't matter, since if you can write the backups regularly, you can obviously still read them; when a medium starts going out of style, switch before your backup hardware dies. And the data format doesn't matter since you handle that on the primary storage.
With the view that your backups don't need to last in mind, you can now select a backup strategy. Simplest solution is a second HDD for first level, either RAID or periodic sync with a USB/FW drive, and DVD-Rs second level.
And keep your backups offsite.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Avoid copy protected CDs and DRM encumbered formats like the plague. They're not worth paying for, because you'll never know for how long you'll be able to play them.
Sometimes I wonder: What if I had to bring out my old 386 to play the music I bought 15 years ago? I'd feel cheated, but today people seem to put up with this. They buy DRM-ed files and copy restricted CDs which happens to work on most of today's equipment, but who knows with the computers and CD players of the (near) future? 15 years is not a long time, really, but computers have evolved immensely in that time.
In case you find yourself having to recover info from old magnetic tapes (which have oxides that increasingly tend to flake-off over time), here are a couple of articles about baking tapes in order to restore the adhesion of magnetic particles to the substrate:
http://www.josephson.com/bake_tape.html
http://www.wendycarlos.com/news.html#baketape
The Wendy Carlos article is particularly interesting to me since it involves the soundtrack to the movie TRON.
FWIW all the CDROMs I have from 13 years ago are still readable. My early 6 year-old CD-RWs are also still working.
Note that the quality of CD-r media has decreased exponentially.
I have several unrecoverably bad CD-Rs of different vendors, which are less than 2 year old and have been kept in a cool, dark storage container without being read more than one time (md5sum-validation after burning).
Has anyone made similar experiences?
-l