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Has Anyone Seen the Moon Pictures?
NASA has received a lot of bad press in the last few years. Now in a stunning move to prove how much they have learned from past mistakes, it appears they have lost the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk. They also seem to have misplaced the original recordings of the other five Apollo moon landings. Hopefully nobody has taped an episode of "The OC" over them yet.
Don't have time to double check but at first glance this appears to be a dupe:
1 3/1654200
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/
Bottom line is this, we went to the Moon! If you truly believe that it was a hoax, please read this - and then for the love of FSM, get off the ADD drugs and re-evaluate...
I'm not fat, just big boned...
Old technology sucks. I know, because I'm an old technologist.
The year was 1969, peeps, 37 years ago.
Magnetic tape degrades. For the 7 track stuff used back then you were lucky to get 7 years out of a tape -- that's why the IRS required only 7 years backup of data, they couldn't reliably ask for more. 9 track wasn't substantially better. Look up "print-through" (you may have to resort to paper sources for that).
Disk space was expensive and hard to get too -- 55mb IBM 2370 disk pack cost about $1K each or worse in old money iirc. People weren't even aware of the need to make backups yet, and that was for data only -- the idea of storing video in digital form didn't happen until the late 70's when JPL trialled storage of images as well as image catalogues (don't ask about JPLOS -- please. Or Mark IV.).
Film degrades too. We've lost a lot of original movies and animation because of the chemically active film substrata.
I wouldn't be surprised if they "lost" it because the media simply degraded to the point of unusability. When was the last time you wrote your congresscritter to have NASA data archives funded properly? They're mostly living from grant to grant there and conserving this fantastically important data won't happen without a push. So push!
Mmmm. Lost a planet Obi-Wan did. Embarrassing!
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
You can still watch it and the material is everywhere, the problem is just that the original tapes were lost, which is a bummer, but not a huge bummer to me. It would've been nice to see some higher res footage of it than what we have now.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Umm... the 7 year thing comes from the Mosaic code, not magnetic backup media. Something about all debts being forgiven after 7 years. It has nothing to do with magnetic storage and has been part of British Common law for centuries.
Dude, have you heard the Jimi Hendrix remasters?
I spent two years playing thirty-year-old 3/4" video tapes direct to air about a year ago. The labels were falling off but the tapes were fine - less foulups than the newer 1990s format we also used. I'm sure NASA's climate-controlled environment is better than ours.
Yer absolutely right, though, that we should ensure adequate funding for NASA's data archives.
Just buy a network storage device with a RAID
Fire, Flood, Theft, Hardware faulure (esp the RAID controller) RAID IS NOT BACKUP!
Copying it to newer media when hard drives are obsolted is an excellent suggestion but if your serious about photos lasting 100 years removable media is needed (preferably two copys one kept offsite). Unfortunatly there are no good domestic backup options, DVD degrate, HDD can fail (even when powered down), tapes are way too expensive. The Iomega Rev drive looks interesting but (click) is untested
Perhaps the best suggestion I've seen is effectivly doing a DVD RAID and make a parity disk here and here for details, I only have one reservation about the suggestion in thoes posts. They propose burning the PAR2 files onto the same DVD I'd be inclined to burn it to a seperate disk but leave the outer sectors of the data disk blank as the outer edge is often the first part to fail (as the plastic splits apart). for extra peace of mind reburn (or at least test) the backups every couple of years.
Perhaps those tapes were on stock not vulnerable to the binder degrading over time causing the oxide to literally fall off the backing, or that has a problem often known as "vinegar syndrome" where the binder reacts with the backing producing a sticky residue (I believe certain Ampex tapes from the 70's/80's are good examples of this). Many recording studios have been stung by these problems, particularly the residue one, to the point that specialist companies have sprung up to deal with the problems. One solution is to cool or bake the tapes respectively, but it doesn't always work.
c are.html and http://www.tiguersound.com/Studio_Information/Tape Bake.html
One large classical music label in the UK (sadly now dead) had major issues with these problems in the early 90's, and decided to take action before it was too late. They played all of their tapes through a specially modified deck which I believe had basically huge swabs to catch the residue before the tape passed any of the mechanism. The audio was then recorded onto modern DAT tape. Those master tapes were all almost certainly ruined in the process, but at least there is a backup on modern DAT using tape which is supposedly not susceptible to the problem.
More information at http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byauth/st-laurent/
is here
http://michaelsmith.id.au