470

Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 months ago by some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

152 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 30 points 2 months ago

To me, this is just another story of the music industry's technical incompetence.

Even in the 1990s, everyone would have known that hard drives were not a long-term archival storage solution. This is like crumpling up a piece of paper, tossing it in the corner, then being upset decades later when your "archival solution" had issues.

[-] iopq@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago

The piece of paper is basically much more likely to survive in a corner barring a fire. I have crumpled pieces of paper from 20 years ago. My PATA hard drive... I don't even have a computer with that connector

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 months ago

A bunch of paper tossed into a corner could get wet, mouldy, get munched on by rats, etc. But, I know what you mean. Spinning plates full of magnetized bits with a connector technology that only lasts a decade at most is hardly going to be reliable, even if stored under ideal conditions.

[-] AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee 5 points 2 months ago

Not to mention bit rot

[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 2 months ago

I'm sure they considered anyone telling them they needed to spend money to be a pain in the ass the same way companies don't follow the recommendations of their IT departments.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 4 points 2 months ago

The problem isn't even the hard drives, it's how they are managing them. There's not many digital data storage solutions around that you can dump into a closet for a few decades and then still read.

You have to regularly test your hard drives, so that when one fails you can take your other copy of the data and put it on a new drive.

this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024

470 points (97.6% liked)

Technology

59648 readers

1520 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS