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Testing Old Tapes To Save Them

Posted by Soulskill on from the good-news-for-that-closet-full-of-backups-you're-afraid-to-touch dept.

JMarshall writes: Recordings on old audio tapes won't be worth much in another 20 years, and some are already too degraded to play. A team including members from the Library of Congress report that infrared spectroscopy can noninvasively separate magnetic tapes that can still be played from those that can't, without risking the tapes by sticking them in a player. Unplayable tapes can sometimes be rescued by heating, which can make them playable for long enough to digitize. This method could help archivists identify which tapes need special handling before they get any worse.

2 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Minimally Invasive. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The abstract actually says "Minimally Invasive," not Non-Invasive (the goal) Aparently the technique analyses small sections of tape to see if the physical media has degraded. Not sure how that tells us *anything* about the magnetic state of the media.

  2. Re:To What Medium by _merlin · · Score: 4, Informative

    The ROM's on early-80's consoles are still, on the whole, perfectly readable (as evidenced by MAME), and they don't even TRY to use error correcting codes to ensure resiliency.

    As a MAME developer, I have the sad duty to inform you that this, sadly, is not the case. ROMs for early video games are gradually succumbing to bitrot. EPROMs used in arcade games eventually leak their trapped charges, and mask layers oxidise in mask ROMs. Flash ROMs from newer arcade games can degrade in as little as 15 years. If you're lucky you can get a good read by heating the chip up or cooling it down. But in many cases the data is permanently lost.