One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle archives for the media industry’s vaults. What the company has been seeing lately should ring alarm bells. Approximately one-fifth of the 1990s hard drives sent by the company are completely unreadable.
Music industry magazine “Mix” spoke to a person in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting story is part explanation of how complicated it is to archive music today, and part warning about everyone’s data being stored on spinning disks.
“In our work, when we discover problems inherent in a format, it makes sense to let everyone know,” Robert Koszela, global director of studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix spoke. “It may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not. It’s a call to action.”
Hard drives became popular over spooled magnetic tape for digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and tape’s perceived shortcomings, such as delamination of the substrate and degradation in fire. However, hard drives have their own archival issues. Standard hard drives are also not designed for long-term archiving. It’s almost impossible to separate the magnetic disk from the internal reading hardware, so if either fails, the entire drive shuts down.
There are also common computer storage issues, such as separation of samples and finished tracks, and proprietary file formats that require archived versions of the software. Still, Iron Mountain told Mix that content can be accessed “as long as the disk platters are spinning and undamaged.”
However, “whether it will rotate or not” is becoming a big question mark. Currently, musicians and studios delving into their archives to remaster tracks often find themselves with drives that have failed in some way, even if stored at industry standard temperatures and humidity, and are left with partial recovery options. Often you will find that it is not available.
“It’s very sad when a project comes into the studio and the hard drive is in a brand new case and the wrapping paper and tags from where it was purchased are still there,” Koschera says. “Next to that is the case with the safety drive in it. All is well. And they’re both bricks.”
Triumph of entropy
Mr. Mix’s Iron Mountain warning broke Hacker News earlier this week, spurring other stories about faith in the wrong format. Bottom line: You can’t trust any media, so copy important things over and over to new storage. “Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses its magnetic charge, bearings seize, and flash storage loses its charge,” user Abra Kadaniel wrote. “Entropy wins sometimes much faster than expected.”
There is an argument that SSDs are not archival at all. The quality of floppy disks varied greatly in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. How Linear Tape-Open, a format specifically designed for long-term tape storage, becomes incompatible with each generation. About the binder sleeves that hold CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that are so bent that they can no longer be read.
Hard drives eventually failing is nothing new. Ars wrote in 2005 about the five stages of hard drive failure, including denial. Last year, backup company Backblaze shared failure data for certain drives, showing that failed drives tend to fail within three years and that no drive is completely exempt. And that time usually wears out all drives. Google’s server drive data from 2007 found that HDD failures are mostly unpredictable and temperature is not actually the determining factor.
So Iron Mountain’s warning to music companies is yet another warning of what we’ve already heard. But it’s always good to get new data about how fragile good archives really are.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
