Iron Mountain, a company that specializes in archiving the vaults of the media industry, said that 20 percent of the hard drives used to archive music recordings from the 90s are dead and unreadable.

During the said era, hard drives replaced spooled magnetic tapes in digital audio workstations as they are smaller, less prone to deterioration, and safer to fires.

What the industry didn’t realize is that standard hard drives were not designed for long-term use. As per the report, the magnetic disks and the hardware that reads them cannot be, in a majority of cases, decoupled. So if either of them fails, the whole storage device will be completely unusable.

Many musicians and recording studios are recently trying to dig their archives, which contain separate tracks and samples, in an attempt to create a remastered version of a song.

However, they are finding out that the drives have died, despite being stored in a room with industry-grade temperature and humidity. What’s worse, there’s no partial recovery option available.

The bottom line, as per the report, is that you really can’t trust any medium of storage for long-term archival. After a couple of years, you may have to migrate your data to a new drive or a new medium of storage.

Via: Ars Technica

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