Following on from my previous post about music, I mentioned how I had copied some of my vinyl based music on to CD’s so that I could listen to the music (especially film soundtracks) in my car. This led me to remember a story I saw recently about digital data degradation, or rather the degradation of the media (CD, DVD, Tape, hard drive) used to store image and music data.
One of the major benefits of vinyl, is that providing that you look after them, use a good stylus (needle), don’t put them near any heat source, the vinyl record will ‘hold’ its data, in its original format forever (I have some very old original 78 vinyl that play as well today (probably better) than they did when the first came out), the same cannot be said for other forms of media. How many of us have had a unique cassette tape ‘chewed’ up, never being able to smooth out those crease again! Remember the Betamax/VHS battle, I expect we will see the same ‘issue’ with the forthcoming DVD battle between ‘Blue-Ray’ and the HD-DVD formats.
What does this mean for the ordinary ‘consumer’? Well certainly to date CD’s/DVD’s have proved to be a pretty ‘safe’ medium for storage of digital data, probably safer than tape due to its higher venerability to damage. Laser Discs once a media hailed as ‘the’ medium for long term storage has lost its leadership. In fact according to reports, the BBC’s own 1986 Doomsday Project ran into problems with its laser disc storage of the project as the ‘state-of-the-art’ storage ‘system’ became obsolete, luckily the project was transferred onto the Internet for future use.
The moral of this post I suppose is that you should not rely too heavily on your data storage media always being the one that will survive all others. As technology changes and technology companies try to lure us into new ‘standards’ for media storage, make sure that a) what you have stored on your media can still be read by your current reader and b) always make sure that you have at least two backups of your data, just in case one of them fails. If you don’t have a backup of your digital image or music data, then when you’ve finished reading this post, then go and make one.
By the way, you may think that big organisations have this all sewn up, the 1975 Viking Lander run by NASA has no original mission data in digital form, all that they now have to is paper printouts, the storage tapes that held this data ended up blank!
Tags: NASA, Digital Preservation Coalition, Betamax
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