Ars Technica: One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry's vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.
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I feel like there has to be some way for backups to be preserved that’s not like a crazy old or complicated system. Obviously I don’t know much but it seems like with all the technological innovations that have been happening, there has to be some company or startup or whatever that’s working on long term storage for the music industry. Like, it feels way too archaic for such a fast paced industry to not have a standardized storage system that’s not going to give up on them halfway and can actually store stuff for essentially forever. Yes, there’s spotify and other listening apps but that’s different, it’s not actually a proper archival system that acts as a backup without fail. Honestly, people need to get on it with either AI or just their brains and create some kind of device that makes sure the music industry is up to date with their storage systems.
The issue of data storage has always been a problem. From rot, fire, degradation, and keeping the data safe from tampering and theft, there are a lot of dangers to data that is being saved. As a consumer, cloud storage is a blessing with not having to worry about data loss and being able to access it anywhere in the world with an internet connection. The data does need to be stored somewhere though, and the storing, access, and protection of that data is costly. The loss of the original recordings of music is a great loss, especially as it's only the most convenient way to access the more popular songs today through streaming services. More obscure songs have been lost to time. The best way to store data I think would be a decentralized, redundant, and failure resistant technology so that if a part of it fails it might still be recoverable rather than a total loss.
This is a really interesting look at technology and how what once seemed cutting edge and secure can very quickly (or at least relatively quickly) become obsolete and break. While it was clearly known on a production and manufacturing level that these drives were not built for the long term, I do find it interesting how convenience won out over trying to figure out alternatives to this technology especially as the technology we have access to has advanced. In the end, I think this speaks to a larger conversation we will be having about permanence and security of systems and data stored in “permanent” drives and similar storage devices. I do hope there is a way to recover and catalog the data that is being sent in an unreadable format, maybe through sending a separate copy or some niche recovery system. Overall, this was an interesting read, and I’m curious to see if we see different variations of this conversation pop up over different sectors.
As I was reading this, I was kind of astonished that the music industry is still using hard drives as the main sources of storage in their servers. I can understand how having a hard drive might be better than an SSD, just because it writes the actual code instead of keeping it all electrical. I am surprised that no one saw this coming, and that they haven't been swapping hard drives regularly after a few years just to make sure everything stays in good shape. The article does mention SSD's and upon reading the linked article, it all seems like pretty baseless claims that SSD's would not be a good choice for storing data. I am curious to see if they change how they are storing all of this data, and if they switch to something in the cutting edge like quantum memory if that isn't well suited for the long term storage needs of the music industry.
This is an interesting problem, and I never would have thought it was a problem in the first place. It seems weird that the music industry is relying on 30 year old hard drives, whose shortcomings are pretty well known at this point. I guess it is true that entropy will get at any form of storage eventually, so the only option is to continually swap data from one form of storage to another. It puts into perspective the challenges of maintaining any type of media, for example YouTube. Do they continually swap out old drives for new ones? Someone once told me that at Bethlehem Steel, there was a crew that continually changed all the lightbulbs in the plant regardless of whether or not they had burned out. Maybe that’s what they do, or should do, with hard drives. I’m a little surprised that the industry’s hard drives aren’t all dead already. I have a desktop PC from 2018, and the hard drive barely works anymore – and that’s only 6 years (granted, I’ve used that PC a lot, whereas the music industry’s drives have just sat in boxes unplugged).
Heard that we are living in a digital dark age. Where there is so much data to be stored. it will be impossible to get through where anything meaningful gets left behind. And so recently, there's been a push to buy the CD, make the scrapbooks, and for Theatre, print your scripts. Storage has always been an issue. What we make as a societies usually not meant to last forever. And so it's left to the archivists of the world that we trust to transcribe, back up, and preserve what they can. One would think in the case of hard drives, that if it fails after a certain amount of time, they would simply need to copy it onto a new drive. In a renewal of sorts. But the amount of uncertainty of about when a hard drive would fail., In addition to the massive amount of materials cost, it would take to produce so many new drives so often could present a lot of issues as well. I think our society is still figuring out how to handle documentation in this new age of technology. Hundreds of years from now, we'll figure out what actually made it.
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