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.

Re:music == any other data

[moonbender]

You don't explicitly say so yourself, but clearly in hindsight it would have been a good idea to rip into a lossless container in the first place. There are plenty of choices - APE, Shorten or FLAC. Since you probably compressed at a fairly high bitrate anyway, the loss of space isn't extreme, either.

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.

Do it the Linus Torvalds way

[mangu]

Get everyone to mirror your server

Re:Do it the Linus Torvalds way

[Stevyn]

Do what I do, zip it to a file called windows_longhorn_beta1_src.zip and make a torrent for it. According to the MPAA, you'll have 10,000,000 copies spread over night.

Avoid copy "protection"

[Looke]

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.

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.

Re:Also, put it in another location--not in same a

[unitron]

"Don't put that backup in the same house/building. Take it to somewhere else off-site if it is that urgent. Of course, if Earth blows up, oh well! :)"

Like I've always said, if you don't have off-planet back-up, you don't have back-up. :-)

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.