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Tape Disintegration Threatens Historical Records, But Chemistry Can Help (nautil.us)
An anonymous reader writes: Modern storage methods are designed with longevity in mind. But we haven't always had the scientific knowledge or the foresight to do so. From the late 60s to the late 80s, much of the world's cultural history was recorded on magnetic tapes. Several decades on, those tapes are disintegrating, and we're faced with the permanent loss of that data. "The Cultural Heritage Index estimates that there are 46 million magnetic tapes in museums and archives in the U.S. alone—and about 40 percent of them are of unknown quality. (The remaining 60 percent are known to be either already disintegrated or in good enough condition to be played.)" Fortunately, researchers have worked out a method to determine which copies are recoverable. They "combined a laptop-sized infrared spectrometer with an algorithm that uses multivariate statistics to pick up patterns of all the absorption peaks." Here's the abstract from their research paper. "As the tapes go through the breakdown reaction, the chemical changes give off tiny signals in the form of compounds, which can be seen with infrared light—and when the patterns of reactions are analyzed with the model, it can predict which tapes are playable."
Our young men have not died in vain, ...
The tapes have recorded their names.
Freeze them all and wait until a 3d Printer can scan and reconstruct them at the atomic level...
Just try, if they're playable great. If not, then... what? Here's the paper on which something once was written but is now gone, what's the point of that?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I ran into a related issue about 25 years ago.
I was working in a college media library, and there were several stacks (over 70 tapes in total) of 2" reel-to-reel video tape from the 1960s and 1970s - recordings off air from Public Television, mostly. Some of them were of local shows nobody even seemed to remember, and others were from live performances at the Dallas station or of live feeds from PBS. There was a live Alvin Ailey dance troupe local show from the late 1960s, if I recall correctly.
The problem was that they were recorded in a rare two-inch format - and only four machines that used it were ever even built (no, it wasn't 2" quadruplex, there were still lots of those at the time). I couldn't find a working machine, and the only one I could dig up was missing major parts (like the heads). So unless someone builds a new one from scratch just to read those tapes, all of that is going to disappear - if it hasn't already.
Thank god, I had some awesome BASIC skillz back then that I though were gone for good.
Is this like, 12" laptop sized or 17" laptop sized?
buh-bye.
Bullshit. Citation required. Modern storage methods are designed to be cheap.
A technical and logistical and financial project whose primary goal is longevity (in the multi-hundred-year sense) of that which it stores.
It should not be accomplished by individual media that are designed to last.
Rather it should use network redundancy cleverly and have protocols designed to ensure enough geographically distributed copies always exist.
It would have to carefully consider "readability, interpretability" assurances, such as very standard simple formats and protocols, and the methodology of storing the displaying / interpreting environment and code as well as the data. Emulated 1980s arcade games, now available and playable online, are good examples of this.
Sort of an Internet Archive on steroids. Crowdfunded?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
It sounds like chemistry is what got us into this problem to begin with.
Maybe we really don't need to retain all of this information.
I didn't remember it as being an Ampex, but it might have been the VR-8000. The timeline's about right.
I found a photo online, and that looks like the photo of the one from back then.
Maybe we really don't need to retain all of this information.
Probably not most of it - but you never know for certain.
What is missing these days is the concept of active archiving. The days of taking a book and putting it on a shelf as archiving are long gone. This was probably first noticeable then organizatyions started finding need to stockpile ancient computers as a way to retrieve old data from the large floppy discs and other old school data memory. But then we started getting to where this story pick up, with the coatings flaking off of tapes, whether sound data, or the discs.
And its a maddening issue, as there are ancient tapes that are actually on paper, but still sound good, and some that the coating is almost gone. As well there are issues with print trough, which has been a problem with old video tapes, as the tape sits nest to it's neighbors above and below it, teh magnetized parts can transfer a little bit, and the image can get a little fuzzy over time.
And we can't get complacent at all about CDs and DVDs I don't know if the young'uns remember at all about the great writable CD shortage era - this was when 1 CD cost around 11 dollars. And tehy were going bad quickly. I don't know if they were trying to reduce demand or if they were havienthat much difficulty making them, but it was difficult to get any for a while, and when you found one they were rationend out like WW2 tires.
Then ther ewere the CD devouring fungi that ate the data from the unsealed sides of the CD. Bottom line is you should hope you don't need data stored on CD's from the mid 90's.
So now if something is worth archiving, it needs to be in a form that you can continue to re-archive often.
People often bust NASA's chops whne tehy lose old data. I understand perfectly how this happens. re-archive old data, or hire a new accountant ot oversee where all of the pencils go, and the accountant wins every time, while the data slowly fades away.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The Blu Ray version of M-Disk might be worth a look, as they're supposed to last for 1000 years. Also "backup" a spare drive that's capable of reading them.
If not I suggest printing all the data out on boxes of blue and white stripey paper.
Kept it 7 years, it's going in the dump next month, this is the final offer. Primarily NYT 1970-2000
Gently reply
Uh, lets see -
CDs suck for long term archival storage. Professional photographers found that the hard way.
You have any idea how many CD's it would take to back up all those tapes?
DING DING DING, we have a winner!. Copyright has made us lose more shit than it ever helped provide. I'd personally like to murder the people responsible for me not being able to see all of Buster Keaton's movies. Anymore I think a copyright of over 10 years is excessive, and we need an automatic exception for any archival efforts.
A HDD is good for maybe 5-10 years, but USB-sticks, unpowered SSDs and writable optical media may become unreadable after as little as a year. Unless you keep several redundant copies and verify and re-copy regularly, you are going to lose that data. The one readily-available exception is, surprisingly, archival-grade _tape_.
This basically shows that the story writers have really no clue what they are talking about.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is kind of obvious thing that further you look in the past, more durable recordings you OBSERVE. There might have been a lot of non-durable paleolithic 'books' - but we will never know. And if somebody looks at our stuff in 1000 years, they will say - these guys knew how to preserve data, they made all these engravings on memorials and metal plates on benches, while we have everything recorded in supervolatile quantum displacement substrate.
Or, what is more probable, they will just smash our stuff with clubs while chanting sacred verses from whatever version of holy book will win in race to dumb human progress in next hundred years.
That is not magnetic media. What exactly do you expect the radiation to do to the physical grooves on that gold record? Reshape them?
I think they mean they know which condition it is in without further specifying the percentage of bad and good. It would be far more useful if they had provided the information about how that 60% was split up.
I want them alive. No disintegrations!
You have any idea how many CD's it would take to back up all those tapes?
Not as many as you might think as they would be Bluray, or Modisc, which both have decent storage densities. You could even move them over to more modern tapes that are up in the 6TB range now.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yeah, because no one makes durable storage, it just isn't a thing...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
No. History has taught us that if you want it to last you have to etch it in stone.
Did nobody just backup those tapes the moment CDs became widely available?
Recordable CDs didn't appear for nearly a decade after the CD was introduced, and when they did they were insanely expensive. What they usually did was record to a newer tape, or some newer format like DAT, DASH or ProDIGI. None of these strategies would really pan out properly, however.
A new analogue copy would work, but we now know that between 1975 and 1995 Ampex tapes still had the sticky shed problem, which is exactly what we're trying to solve. With DAT the machines are intricate and fragile, being essentially tiny video recorders and AFAIK they haven't been made for some time. They're harder to keep working than say, a Studer A80 or MCI which mostly use off-the-shelf electronics and still have quite a large supply of parts and decent OEM support.
DAT also recorded at 48KHz instead of 44.1 so an eventual transfer to CD would be lossy owing to sample rate conversion, or plays back at the wrong speed, but there were quite a few DAT machines made so you could still do the transfer. Assuming the thin, fragile videotape in the DAT cartridge hasn't deteriorated.
DASH... machines sometimes turn up on ebay but are probably just scrapped because no-one wants them. Being digital they won't have 'the tape sound' so even the retro nuts like me won't touch them. ProDigi machines are like hen's teeth.
So no, a 1980s format conversion could potentially have made things even worse. Indeed, one of the favourite formats for budget digital recording was... Betamax.
"Tape Disintegration Threatens Historical Records... From the late 60s to the late 80s, much of the world's cultural history was recorded on magnetic tapes." Good heavens! Are the historical records of the early Star Trek episodes in danger?