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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."
Freeze them all and wait until a 3d Printer can scan and reconstruct them at the atomic level...
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.
buh-bye.
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?
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.
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.