One of the jobs that data storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is archiving media industry vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: About a fifth of the hard drives dating back to the 1990s that have been sent to it are completely unreadable.
Music Industry Publication Mix I spoke to the people in charge of supporting the entertainment industry. The resulting account is part explanation of why music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone’s data 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 of studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. “It may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not; it’s a call to action.”
Hard drives gained popularity over reel-to-reel magnetic tapes as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the perceived disadvantages of tapes, including deterioration from separation from the substrate and fireBut hard drives present their own archiving problems. Standard hard drives were also not designed for long-term archival use. Magnetic disks can almost never be decoupled from the internal reading hardware, so if one fails, the entire drive dies.
There are also general computer storage issues, such as separating samples and finished tracks, or proprietary file formats that require archival versions of the software. Still, Iron Mountain tells Mix that “if the disk platters are spinning and not damaged,” you can access the content.
But “if it spins” is becoming a big unknown. Musicians and studios now digging through their archives to remaster tracks often find that drives, even when stored at industry-standard temperature and humidity, have somehow failed, with no partial recovery option available.
“It’s very sad to see a project arrive at the studio with a hard drive in a brand new box, with the packaging and labels from where it was purchased still inside,” says Koszela. “Next to it is a box with the backup drive inside. Everything is in order. And both are bricks.”
Entropy wins
Mix relays Iron Mountain warning reached Hacker News earlier this weekwhich gave rise to other stories of faith in the wrong formats. The essence of the matter: no medium can be trusted, so important things are copied over and over again to a new storage medium. “Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.” user abracadaniel writes“Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than expected.”
It is being discussed how SSDs are not files at all; how the quality of floppy disks varied wildly between the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s; how Linear Tape-Open, a format designed specifically for long-term tape storage, loses compatibility over successive generations; how the sleeves we put our CD-Rs and DVD-Rs in have caused 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 deathincluding denial, in 2005. Last year, the backing company Backblaze shared data on specific drive failuresshowing that failing units tend to fail within three years, that no unit was completely exempt, and that time generally wears out all units. Google Server Drive Data He showed in 2007 that hard drive failures were largely unpredictable and that temperatures were not really the deciding factor.
So Iron Mountain’s warning to record companies is yet another warning about something we’ve heard before. But it’s always good to get new data on how fragile a good archive really is.
This story originally appeared in Ars Technica.