Most people think their data is safe if it’s backed-up. Even better if a copy is stored off-site in a secure location.
This is a good short-term solution, but what about medium-to-long term? When you burned all your family photos to CD-ROM a few years ago, did you really expect that CD to still be readable today? What if you used a file format that’s not recognised by your computer in ten years?
The problem we have with backup longevity is two-fold: it all comes back to hardware and software.
Recently I was asked by Tech Talk Radio panelist Graeme Callaghan to dig-out some old audio files, from a radio project we both worked on many years ago. YJ Radio was a community radio station that we set up every Easter for the St John Ambulance cadet group, in Yarra Junction. We did this from about 1993 to 2002. The project slowly developed from a small mixing desk with two CD players, and a 10-watt transmitter loaned to us by NEC Broadcast, until its final year which involved mini-disc players, DAT-machine recorders, computers, a computer network, a TTL microphone switch, PABX and radio tower with side-mounted dipole.
All this was a great deal of fun and we used to backup all our data to CD-ROM, and all our audio to CD-DA, DAT cartridges, VHS tape, mini-discs and reel-to-reel tape. Remember this was before the age of writeable DVDs, memory sticks and on-line storage.
When Graeme asked me to find some files last week, I went straight to the Wardrobe of Organised Chaos in my home office. I knew exactly where the YJ Radio discs were stored. But imagine my dismay when I pulled-out a handful of these little suckers:
LS-120 disks seemed like a great idea at the time. Just when we started realising that a single MP3 file was never going to fit on a 1.44 MB disc, Imation came up with a great idea. This was to make 3½” floppy drives, which could read/write conventional 1.44MB floppies, but could also read/write super-high-capacity 120MB floppies. I seem to remember at the time they were competing directly with those external Iomega “ZIP” drives.
I also found some audio and data CDs in the YJ Radio collection: Kodak media with a 1997 production date. Could I still read these, I wondered? What if the physical surface of the discs had deteriorated over time, and ten years of project work had simply been lost?
Fortunately, my Media Centre PC could read each and every one of the CDs without any problem. It was like peeking inside a musical time capsule, and we found at least one of the files that Graeme had been looking for. Also very fortunately, we had been using file formats which were still in use today: wave and MP3 (even if the bit rates were at a blisteringly-high 128 kb/s). So our hardware passed the test of time (the ten-year-old CDs), as did our software (the audio file formats and the file-system on the CD).
Next for the LS-120s. Believe it or not, I actually found a working LS-120 drive in the junk box. It was looking pretty sad and lonely, and it buzzed to life when I plugged it in.
It could actually read some of the discs I fed into it, and I copied everything possible to hard disk straight away. Unfortunately there were some discs that wouldn’t read at all, and some which appeared to have a valid directory structure, but did this when I tried to copy the contents:
So the LS-120 hardware didn’t pass the test of time. Not 100%, anyway, like the Kodak CDs. And if I hadn’t found a drive, I would have had 600MB of unreadable media. The data would have been wholly lost forever.
Now in terms of software and file formats, I was lucky that everything was written in formats we still use today. But what if the discs contained WordPerfect 4.2 files, or photographs in an early version of Kodak’s “KDC” format… then what? Again, data which can’t be accessed or converted to a usable format is as good as lost forever.
Many people today are in the same situation, when they find that they can’t get a replacement globe for their 30-year-old Super-8 projector. They have hours and hours of childhood memories on a storage medium (in this case, film) which can no longer be viewed, accessed, converted or used in any way. The same goes for beta video tapes, audio cassettes, and the same will happen to millions with VHS tapes over the next few years.
Graeme made a similar comment re. his Ampex mastering tapes, which we used in the early years of YJ Radio before the sound cards in our computers could do anything other than play MIDI files. How do we get audio off these old tapes? The answer is, we don’t, if we can’t find a functional tape deck.
But the problem is not just limited to old-fashioned or “retro” technologies. Consider the high-definition format war which has just been won by BluRay. Since the announcement by Toshiba in February this year that it would stop manufacturing HD-DVD media, anyone with even a small investment in HD-DVD must decide the best way forward.
So what’s the moral of the story? Maintain an active interest in your backup and storage regime. If the worst ever happens and you need to restore data from backups, make sure you can actually read the backups. Make sure the storage media is still in common use. Make sure the file formats you’re using are in common use.
Otherwise, when it comes to crunch time, you might be left stranded.
