This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Not to mention bit rot
I got four HDDs, some are almost 10 years old. They work great but I know that won't be for forever.
I have probably lost lots of pictures die to head crash. WD especially
I only lost two HDDs in my life. Both in 2009. And yes, they were WDs
The only one that didn't die because of my own fault (two externals and a laptop one sigh), was one of the infamous IBM/Hitachi Deathstars.
I've had many deathstars fail.
Old sysadmin trick I was taught was to freeze the drives overnight, have used this trick on multiple occasions, but once the drive heats back up it's really dead. But you've generally got ample time to backup the drive before it dies.
Mine was a first generation one and as it was dying the first articles popped up about how bad they and the following generation were failing. Didn't bother with warranty... wasn't fond of gambling with the failure rates. Irony was that I named the drive Deathstar when I got it (I have the long standing tradition naming my drives after space ships).
Gonna remember that for the next drive failure. Isn't condensation a problem with that trick?
My system is to duplicate to fresh media once in a while. It's more hands on, but it's the only option I have. My NAS will be cloned to new drives in the next few years.
That's the way to do it. Just keep bringing data forward even for media that sits in a drawer.
You might want to look at snapraid. I've recently overhauled my own NAS and love it. It is snapshot based (so not perfect safety) but it is highly configurable and provides parity and scrubbing for corruption even with a JBOD array.
I'll check that out. Thanks.
