Hard Drives from the Music Industry's Archives are Losing Data

 

By C.Stone | Stone News Network

Archival specialist Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services have shared results showing that up to 1/5th of their vault contents containing digital hard drives from the 1990's are now completely unreadable. 

Before the 90's, the majority of studio audio was stored on magnetic tape, in analog format. As shown below

But even magnetic audio tapes can lose their magnetic impressions over time. The material can lose it's magnetism, and even deteriorate due to the temperature, humidity, and even age of the storage material. Not even solid state hard drives can escape the decay of time. All storage media decays.

If you chose to convert the audio into a more structural format such as paper or plastic, you would need a substantial amount of material to represent the audio - vast warehouses would need to be used.

In 2008, there was a warehouse fire at the Universal Studios in Hollywood which destroyed a collection of audio from 700 artists.

With the slow progress of time and movement of technology from analog storage to digital, we need a more permanent solution to this unique, and puzzling problem. How do you protect something? You can't engrave into a stone like the ancient Egyptians once did.

You'd need a massive amount of them.