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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."
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.
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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.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
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...)
Get everyone to mirror your server
When the data is lost, i'm sure iTunes and Visa will be there. And the RIAA will know what to do (take your money again)
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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.
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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.
One reason why music can't be compared to 5.25" floppys is because the information is more important to me. I had a bunch of 5.25" floppys that I ended up throwing away years ago. But I didn't care about the information. (I didn't even know what was on most of the floppys). I care enough about my music to make sure that it gets copied regularly.
Plus, my bet is that we are much more likely to see CD players 40 years from now than you think. Reason: backwards compatibility. Since there is so much info on 4.75" optical discs, it is foolish not to include the capability to read them, even as the storage changes. That's why DVD players play CDs and HD-DVD players will play DVDs and CDs. Just too much information, readily accessible and capable of fast and easy duplication (unlike 12" albums and cassette tapes) for the industries to junk them entirely, for probably at least 20 years. The next 20 years after that, you'll be able to find players (just like you can still find turntables that play 12" LPs.
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.
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So do them a big favor
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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.
Since there are a limited number of songs in the world that everyone listens to, it would be more efficient for everyone to just pool their resources, and backup all of their music to a common area. Then we could use bit torrent to retrieve the files when needed.
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Paper...I open it up mp3's in notepad and click print
One of these days i'll type it back in, and hit rename on that txt file
Burn speed can potentially affect how successfully you copy your data, as different CD-Rs react differently to the choice of laser write strategy.
In short, cyanine discs (often bluish-greenish in color) are reputed to handle slower burn speeds better, whereas pthalocyanine discs (often yellow or clear) are supposedly better at higher burn speeds.
I realize that I've used lots of qualifiers in my comment, because frankly I don't have as much experience burning CD-Rs as many others, and your particular combination of recorder/CD-R media/player may give you different results.
Memorex (no personal connection) has a detailed 1.8 MB pdf about digital media.
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The whole question is based on false premise. There's lots of media that's advertised as long term, but how do you know that you can find inexpensive tech to play it back forty years from now? You should plan on making complete copies of all your music (and other data) every ten years, just to make sure that it's in a form people still use. Then you only have to worry about finding media that lasts you ten years -- though to play it safe, you should add an extra decade safety margin.
How confident are you that the music you are collecting today will still be playable in forty years?
A better question: How confident am I that I'll actually *want* the music I'm collecting today to be playable in forty years?
Direct away from face when opening.
Like I've always said, if you don't have off-planet back-up, you don't have back-up. :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
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-l
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.
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