music archive, 100 year method

Status
This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.
I guess its an OCD thing but I want to archive my music somehow for long term storage in a remote location.

The library is now around 600Gb containing lossless m4a apple and some MP3.
Not worried about the format as m4a is open source and BSD/Linux will be here a thousand years from now.

As an experiment I have burried a couple of flash thumbs in back yard and dug up after one year. They were wrapped in aluminum foil and suspended in a glass jar, embedded in unscented paraffin. Yes bees wax is better.

They worked perfectly after I retrieved and downloaded. The foil helps even out temperature when melting wax. It keeps the wax out too.

Maybe a public wilderness preserve is the best location. Natural landmarks required as GPS may not work properly.

I lost a camping cache once as the terrain had drastically changed and when I tried to locate, no avail digging many holes. Metel detector could not pick up because it was around two feet down.

Like I said, OCD? maybe.

Any better ideas? Please do not say 'icloud':mad:.
 
Administrator
Joined 2007
Paid Member
I don't think flash drive can be relied on unless it is periodically powered up and refreshed.

I would say at this point that carefully archived original CD's (not recordable media) might be the best bet, but that doesn't fit with stuff you have that exists just as digital files.

If you are serious about this then I would suggest using media available today (flash drive and HDD) and being prepared to copy that over to new technology as it appears, say every 8 to 10 yrs.
 
Yep don't know, have the originals in 6 banker boxes (less jewell cases) and some have already separated so there is definitely a finite life on even the originals.

Add the pdf references - books - all archived work projects and takes about 1.3Tb. Probably could get it down to 1Tb. Under $100 each at the moment.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-lis..._child?ie=UTF8&mv_color_name=0&mv_size_name=2


I can't be the only OCD archiver.

The USB3 flash drive is probably best option at this point as USB will be around for a while.

-
 
And we are assuming in 100 years there will remain a way to read a USB stick (assuming). Not unlike today if someone hands you a floppy. You might find a 3.5" floppy reader somewhere, but how many systems can now read a 5" or an 8"? NASA has tons of telemetry data from the earlier years of the space program... and no way to read it. It ran on systems that were scrapped decades ago, and no one writes the software for it.
 
I'm thinking - here is the plan.

Buy one or more usb3 hard drives and bury one or more 'off site' . (I believe is the official IT term.)
They are hermetic sealed in paraffin and weight neutral in the soil.

If using flash , count on 3 year retention. If you never need to recover, then abandon in place and blow it off as price of your icloud insurance.

Another issue with the icloud is changing laws. Maybe what is stored on your icloud drive is one day declared illegal by some future goverment? omg. :spin:
-
 

Attachments

  • image.jpeg
    image.jpeg
    115.2 KB · Views: 438
I have CD-R's from just a few years ago that are unreadable. In 2001, I put a 1 year old file backup CD-R (it had a freeware program I wanted to share with a friend who didn't have internet) into my win98 PC and it locked up and eventually blue screened as I waited. I hit the power button and the computer would no longer boot. I bought a new HDD and installed linux on it and then plugged in the old drive and recovered my files (it still worked but the file system was trashed somehow.

I recently bought an M-disc capable blueray drive and some m discs ($4 each) but haven't used them yet. Backing up 150GB of music and another 100GB of files in 4.7GB chunks is not my idea of a good time.

250/4.7=~53 discs or $212. For not much more than that I can buy a few 3TB discs and a NAS. Get an external drive and copy the NAS to it every so often and store it offsite. If you are paranoid about your data, magnetic media is the most proven option and having at least three copies of your data is best.

Get a server class tape drive and do monthly backups and store them in a safe deposit box ;)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16840108119
 
Last edited:
Administrator
Joined 2007
Paid Member
Ms Stewart said one of the biggest problems was the shortage of equipment to play the outdated tapes.
"The whole infrastructure in relation to video is just disappearing," she said.
"There are technicians who want to retire. We can't let them go until we've got this stuff off these two-inch and one-inch formats.
"There's a limited pool of people who know how to do it. There's a limited pool of machines. The guy who runs the archive is collecting the stuff from car boot sales."

Basil Brush and Tiswas among 'at risk' TV shows, says BFI - BBC News
 
Umm.... are we not still using Seattle's old disk operating that microsoft purchased?

Of course its been renamed several times , think the latest is fat32. NTFS was superior but the product failed.

My old 10.1 SUSE linux box can read every file system known although I can't remember what my CP/M s100 used.

I also had an Ohio Scientific 6502, a Sym-1 6502 with cassettes. Never used SWTP 6800/0 so dont know about that one. Had a Radio Shack CoCo with OS9 and a Model100 with Rs232 floppy.

Any good forensic system can even today read old data cassette files.

If someone says it cannot be read is simply a $$$ issue or they don't want to be bothered with it.

I think we are safe archiving with fat, ext2 or any of the Unix variations.
I'm currently using Apple's BSD dos but not sure how long it will be in widespread use since Steve has passed.

-bruce
 

Attachments

  • image.jpeg
    image.jpeg
    78.1 KB · Views: 418
If someone says it cannot be read is simply a $$$ issue or they don't want to be bothered with it.

I happen to be involved in that kind of thing. It's not as easy as it looks on first sight. Even just SCSI disks can be a problem. Imagine the RAID controller has died, fi.

And a while back, a local museum inherited the estate of a writer, including a box with 5.25" floppies. These were made with a hardware text processor. A local product that was years ahead of it's time, offering WYSIWYG on an A4 screen (ETAP). It was very hard reading those, as they dated before the PC era. I had to build a floppy drive because the format was very different. Fortunately, I still had an IBM drive that could be addressed directly, without the controller trying to figure out what sector to read. But that was just luck. Well that and me having worked with ETAP's before. But still, it took a few days before it dawned on me that it could be that kind of machine that produced these floppies.

No amount of money could save those as nobody was able to build one. The museum had been asking a number of forensic/data recovery specialists before and nobody was able/willing to make a price offer for it. Of course, that also had to do with the fact that this museum wouldn't be able to spend large sums of money on it.

They were very pleased that some unknown/unpublished work of the author was found on one of these floppies.

My personal data archive is on CD's going back some twenty years. These are all still good, with one exception: two CD's burned with OSX 10.0. Fortunately, I also made copies with OS9 and these still work. All of these CD's and DVD's come from Taio Yuden's Fukushima plant. This quality CDR's is no longer available, for obvious reasons.

Now I simply archive on harddrives and copy to a larger set when these are affordable. Of course, that's not a solution is you want to keep your data for a century, as you can't be certain to find SATA hardware in a hundred years...
 
I guess its an OCD thing but I want to archive my music somehow for long term storage in a remote location. (...)

I have nothing to contribute to the discussion, but I like the fact that you admit in public that you have obsessive compulsive disorder. There are so many people with a psychiatric or neurological deviation spending their life in the proverbial closet, continuously pretending to be normal.
 
cyrano,
it has been a few years since using linux professionally but i remember there were numerous commands for bulk dump of everything from eproms,flash, unknown media , lots of scsi, fd0 etc options. It even had a mutiple guess feature.

busybox had one i used frequently for making images of embedded linux production releases.

that one you did was tough , not asking them for big $$$.

Blackhat has some interesting info on forensics. I not too interested in it but amZing how much code is out there now such as 'autopsy' 'sleuth' etc

https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-03/bh-us-03-willis-c/bh-us-03-willis.pdf
This file is over ten years old so cant imagine how things have advanced.

is nothing sacred?

-
 

Attachments

  • image.png
    image.png
    325.6 KB · Views: 242
Last edited:
I work with a small non-profit that tries to collect and restore old media drives. Analog audio tape mostly, but also all these strange drives that have been used, like Jaz, Syquest, Zip, MO...

We have most of those and I try to keep them operational, mostly by collecting as many as possible and hoping one of them will do the job... :rolleyes:

And I keep an archive of old software to make that old stuff work. You usually don't need the original computers, unless it's something really weird.

We"re still looking for multi-track tape as these aren't as common. And since we don't have a big budget, we won't be buying Studer 800's :p

There's even a dedicated Linux build for data recovery and disk repair. Unfortunately, it's called Disktools, which makes it very hard to find. And it's German.

But that won't help at all if the RAID disks are on one of the many controllers that can't be rebuilt without the hardware. In such a case, your data is toast if the controller fails. And usually these controllers are impossible to repair, since the manufacturer refuses to sell the main processor and that's all too often the part that fails.

I know most of the forensic tools out there. But there are so many new ones that it is impossible to follow. My harddisk is full :eek:
 
Wanna buy some Piano Rolls --- left over from my circa 1933 Knabe player piano?

Michael Tilson Thomas recorded some Gershwin using the original piano rolls made by the great one. Amazing that Gershwin's own playing was much faster than what came down the pike.

Just to remind everyone, the Great Library of Alexandria burned in 48 BC, but the good stuff was in wide circulation so is passed along to us even now.
 
Last edited:
Just curious - what do you plan to do with those files 100 years from now?

Well, I love all the music I have, archiving is simply a natural thing to do.

Why 100 years?

As Pass said somewhere on this forum:
"
On reading product specifications, take the 'good' numbers and divide by two.
Then double the 'bad' numbers.
"

So if the archive is designed for 100 years, a hard result will be 25 years.

-
 

PRR

Member
Joined 2003
Paid Member
Vinyl LP. Stuff I bought 50 years ago is still "playable", despite casual storage and herb-dust. You can get a good-quality cut and short-run pressing for around $1K for 40 minutes. 60dB S/N beats heck out of 24-bit that will not read.

I have kin who routinely play 100 year old shellac 78s. Yes, hardly 40dB S/N and 3 minutes per block (more if you find 16" gear), and massive loss with casual handling. And I do not know if you can buy that grade of shellac today. (78 cutting is trivial- digitally slow-down to a 33 cut and cut on still-maintained 33 cutters.)

Audio tape, but expect loss. Around 2003 I was asked to pull-out a recital from 1953. Indeed we had the tape. It was not the good brand of the day. Storage history was unknown but probably mixed. The outside layers of tape, the oxide was flaking badly. Played, the first 30 seconds of the first piece were 50% drop-out. But I was stunned at the quality over the whole tape. RCA ribbon into tube tape deck, in a room I knew well but before they mucked it up in the later 20th century, and I think an engineer who really cared. I have never got a cello sound in that room like this tape had. I assumed the requester was the soloist remembering his youth. I apologized for my predecessors' carelessness. In fact the soloist died soon after the recital. The request was from his son, who had never known his Dad or heard him play. He was moved to tears.

These linear media do not depend on a FAT/ToC to access the data. Most digital FAT/ToC is very error-critical. Pulling raw bits off the bulk and trying to reconstruct "files" can be hard work. (Perhaps easier with write-once music tracks which should not become fragmented.)

I have a fair number of not-so-old CDs that will not play. Some visibly peel.

I have a heap of <10 YO thumb drives that will not read. These things are made for Lowest Cost (Highest Profit) and I think the 99.99% perfect masking and soldering leads to time-related failure.

Few institutions last 100 years un-changed. My road is older than that but essentially vanished 1925-1970 due to changing work and traffic patterns; Ox-Neck road on the bay vanished and never came back, and the old "turnpike" (stage-coach) across the peninsula can not be traced now. The local home for Jews now takes anybody, though care has been constant for a century. But Google dropped Picassa Storage and I lost many files. Compuserve gave me web-space if I paid, and then dropped the service. AT&T did the same; indeed Mighty AT&T hardly lasted a century from Bell Tel to Divestiture. Amazon web services changes the service on a whim. I remember when GeoCities was THE place for web-space, and that's long gone. There are many cloud backup companies and I could see any of them getting bought-out or go belly-up without warning.

Archive.org seems to take a longer view. They will rise and fall and maybe fail, though the data may re-appear. But I don't think they want a personal stash of copyrighted music, and music copyright from recent decades threaten to run forever. (See "Happy Birthday" case-- finally discounted more for registration flaws/fraud than expiration.)

The Georgia Guidestones may be readable in a century. (I'm not keen on the structure's long-term stability.) Similar stone-words have lasted thousands of years. However they are just 5KB of redundant data, on a quarter-MILLion pounds of granite, and would be awkward to hand-transcribe back to music-bits. And stone-work tends to "evaporate" if not watched; nearly all the polished face-stones on the pyramids of Egypt are gone.
 
Status
This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.