Iron Mountain, an enterprise storage and destruction company, is observing a significant issue while handling the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. The company has found that approximately one-fifth of the hard disk drives from the 1990s it received are completely unreadable.
The music industry publication Mix interviewed individuals responsible for backing up the entertainment industry, resulting in a report that serves both as an explainer on the complexities of music archiving today and as a warning about the reliability of data stored on spinning disks.
Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, emphasized the importance of disclosing any inherent problems with storage formats to the public. “It may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not; it’s a call for action,” Koszela stated to Mix.
Hard drives became the preferred choice over spooled magnetic tape due to the rise of digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the various disadvantages associated with tape, including deterioration and vulnerability to fire. However, hard drives pose their own archival challenges. Standard hard drives were not intended for long-term storage, and their magnetic disks cannot be easily separated from the reading hardware inside, causing the entire drive to fail if either component malfunctions.
Additional storage issues arise from the separation of samples and completed tracks as well as proprietary file formats that require specific archival software versions. Iron Mountain informed Mix that they can access content so long as the disk platters can spin and are undamaged. However, ensuring that “if it spins” is becoming increasingly uncertain. Musicians and studios frequently find that old drives fail even when stored under industry-standard conditions, leaving no option for partial recovery.
Koszela illustrated a common scenario: “It’s so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there. Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything’s in order. And both of them are bricks.”
Mix’s dissemination of Iron Mountain’s warning resonated on Hacker News, prompting stories of data loss due to unreliable storage formats. The overarching message was clear: No medium is entirely trustworthy, necessitating regular data copying to fresh storage solutions. Users cited examples of various storage media failing over time due to factors like magnetic charge loss, bearing seizure, and charge dissipation in flash storage.
Discussions included the non-archival nature of SSDs, the variable quality of floppy disks across the decades, the compatibility issues of Linear Tape-Open format over generations, and the bending of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs due to binder sleeves.
The eventual failure of hard drives is a well-known issue, previously addressed by Ars Technica in their article on the stages of hard drive death and by Backblaze’s failure data on specific drives, affirming that drives tend to fail within three years and that all drives deteriorate with time. Google’s server drive data in 2007 also indicated that HDD failure was largely unpredictable and not strongly influenced by temperature.
Iron Mountain’s cautionary note to music companies reiterates the fragility of data archives, underscoring the importance of maintaining robust backup strategies.
This article initially appeared on Ars Technica.