One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. What it’s seeing lately should be a wake-up call: About one-fifth of the hard disk drives built in the 1990s that it ships are completely unreadable.
Music industry publication Mix spoke to the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting story is part explanation of how music is so complicated to archive today, part warning about everyone’s data being stored on spinning disks.
“In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everyone know,” Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. “This may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not; it’s a call to action.”
Hard drives became popular with spooled magnetic tape as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the perceived downsides of tape, including degradation from substrate separation and fire. But hard drives present their own archival problems. Standard hard drives are also not designed for long-term archival use. You can hardly decouple the magnetic disks from the reading hardware inside, so if either one fails, the whole drive dies.
There are also general computer storage issues, including separating samples and finished tracks, or proprietary file formats that require archival versions of the software. However, Iron Mountain told Mix that “if the disk platters are spinning and not damaged,” it will be able to access the content.
But “if it spins” becomes a big question mark. Musicians and studios who now dig into their archives to remaster tracks often find that the drives, even when stored at industry standard temperatures and humidity, fail in some way, with no more available partial recovery option.
“It’s very sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand new case with a wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still there,” Koszela said. “Next to it is a case with a safety drive in it. Everything is in order. And they’re both bricks.”
Entropy wins
Mix’s passing of the Iron Mountain warning hit Hacker News last week, prompting other stories of faith in misguided formats. The gist of it: You can’t trust any medium, so you copy important stuff over and over again, to new storage. “Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize up, flash storage loses charge, etc.,” writes user abracadaniel. “Entropy wins, sometimes faster than you expect.”
There is discussion of how SSDs are not archival; how much floppy disk quality differs between the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s; how Linear Tape-Open, a format specifically designed for long-term tape storage, loses compatibility over successive generations; how the binder sleeves we put on our CD-Rs and DVD-Rs allowed them to bend too much and become unreadable.
Knowing that hard drives will eventually fail is nothing new. Ars wrote about the five stages of hard drive death, including rejection, in 2005. Last year, backup company Backblaze shared failure data on specific drives, showing that the drives that failed tends to fail in three years, with no drive completely exempt, and that time generally wears out all drives. Google server drive data showed in 2007 that HDD failure is almost unpredictable, and temperatures are not really the deciding factor.
So Iron Mountain’s advice to music companies is another warning about something we’ve heard before. But it’s always good to get some new data about how fragile a good archive really is.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
