Testing Old Tapes To Save Them 62
JMarshall writes: Recordings on old audio tapes won't be worth much in another 20 years, and some are already too degraded to play. A team including members from the Library of Congress report that infrared spectroscopy can noninvasively separate magnetic tapes that can still be played from those that can't, without risking the tapes by sticking them in a player. Unplayable tapes can sometimes be rescued by heating, which can make them playable for long enough to digitize. This method could help archivists identify which tapes need special handling before they get any worse.
So finally.. (Score:3)
We can read back the hippie mix tape Richard Nixon prepared for Howard Hunt.
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This one could be read, if we had a working tape deck. ...
Next
This one can't be read anymore. In the trash bin.
Next.
This one could be read, if we had a working tape deck.
Next
This one can't be read anymore. In the trash bin.
repeat, cycling through all the tapes over and over, until none are left.
To What Medium (Score:2)
What digital medium is presumed to be readable 20 years hence?
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Lightly used floppy disks still work.
Perhaps, but good bloody luck trying to find a floppy drive that is high enough quality to actually have head alignment accurate enough to read the aforementioned 'lightly used floppy disk'. Even at their peak there was never any guarantee that a floppy formatted in one drive would work worth a damn in a different drive, especially the further in towards the hub you went.
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Long before people grumbled about how much space was "lost" when you formatted a hard drive, formatting 5 1/4 floppies cost you over 30%...
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Lightly used floppy disks still work.
Perhaps, but good bloody luck trying to find a floppy drive that is high enough quality to actually have head alignment accurate enough to read the aforementioned 'lightly used floppy disk'. Even at their peak there was never any guarantee that a floppy formatted in one drive would work worth a damn in a different drive, especially the further in towards the hub you went.
It's easy to align a floppy disk drive. Especially if you have an alignment disk.
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Digital tape!
Re:To What Medium (Score:5, Interesting)
Memory chips.
The ROM's on early-80's consoles are still, on the whole, perfectly readable (as evidenced by MAME), and they don't even TRY to use error correcting codes to ensure resiliency.
I have CompactFlash of some vintage and it's all still perfectly readable. Even hard drives are quite readable if stored properly and not live for a long time.
I imagine if you really wanted to make something last 20 years and still be readable, a basic EEPROM with I2C-like serial interface will be readable, and you could probably describe a circuit/timing to read from it on the casing of the chip itself with one diagram.
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Re:To What Medium (Score:5, Informative)
As a MAME developer, I have the sad duty to inform you that this, sadly, is not the case. ROMs for early video games are gradually succumbing to bitrot. EPROMs used in arcade games eventually leak their trapped charges, and mask layers oxidise in mask ROMs. Flash ROMs from newer arcade games can degrade in as little as 15 years. If you're lucky you can get a good read by heating the chip up or cooling it down. But in many cases the data is permanently lost.
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I think the best bet is spinning disks with some filesystem that stores data redundantly and does block-level checksums (e.g. ZFS). Then you need to routinely buy new disks to replace the disks, copy your data across, and verify the new copy. Not just when they fail, on a regular schedule every five years or so.
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Then just download the ROMs for your games and if anyone ever asks, just say you ripped them yourself.
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For test equipment the solution is to either copy the ROM into a pin compatible EPROM or convert the pinout to 2764 and use a modern EPROM.
Rose colored glasses (Score:2)
Your confidence is proof of your inexperience. Data... dies. Sorry, that's just the truth.
If you've ever tried to do a data recovery on years-old data, whether it's audio tape, film, HDD, flash, CD/DVD rips, whatever. They all have an error rate that increases over time.
The only way to preserve data long term is to actively manage it. Keep redundant copies. Use error correcting code to identify data errors and correct them. Media must be periodically re-read and written to ensure "freshness". Non-digital da
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Not if they are Mostek mask ROMs with the 2763 pinout. In test equipment and arcade machine those all seem to be failing. Anti-fuse programmable logic from that era is also failing. The fuses seem to be "regrowing".
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What digital medium is presumed to be readable 20 years hence?
The cloud of course. It is the end-all-be-all. Haven't you heard?
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Pressed CD / DVD Roms seem to have a decent shelf life. Of course, building a die is cost prohibitive, and it is possible to store them in adverse conditions that eventually destroy the silver layer (but the depth could theoretically still be probed by other means, I imagine)
Burnt CD Roms have issues with the dye decomposing. Some of them won't even last ten years, while others might make it to the 20 year mark.
There is a Blu-Ray tech that boasts +200 year life expectancy. One example:
"Verbatim M-Disc optical media is the new standard for digital archival storage. Unlike traditional optical media, which utilize dyes that can break down over time, data stored on an M-Disc is engraved on a patented inorganic write layer – it will not fade or deteriorate. This unique engraving process renders these archival grade discs practically impervious to environmental exposure, including light, temperature and humidity.
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Yep, I had a batch of DVD-R in the early 2000s that didn't even last 4 years in normal storage. Kept in cases in a cupboard with no great humidity or temperature variation, the dye still degraded incredibly fast, and more than 50% of the data was unreadable when I checked them.
I can't remember the name of the brand off the top of my head (I just remember the discs were bright orange on top), but I'm pretty sure they used Ritek dye which was notoriously awful at the time.
After that, I switched to Taiyo Yuden
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It doesn't need to. Once you have the data in digital form you can keep migrating it to whatever the best storage device of the day is without incurring any further quality loss.
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100% agree. Regular backup and migration is the way to go, preferably with the data in multiple places. This is daunting for large-scale applications, but if the data is that important, it's worth doing right.
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What digital medium is presumed to be readable 20 years hence?
Etch QR codes on stone tablets.
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What digital medium is presumed to be readable 20 years hence?
Paper tape
If you have a problem, if no one else can help, a (Score:1)
If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.
They are wanted in the UK.
There rap sheet is a long list of 10 year sentence for copyright for each song / piece of work.
SOS (Score:2)
Feeling Old (Score:2)
Nothing like nostalgia of tape media to make one feel old.
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Nothing like nostalgia of tape media to make one feel old.
Except maybe vinyl!
Minimally Invasive. (Score:2, Informative)
Magnetic state not a major issue. (Score:2)
The magnetic state is not likely to be a significant issue,provided the tape is not exposed to excessive heat or strong magnetic fields (like from lightning currents in a nearby structural element or having the storage box sitting on the floor next to an industrial-scale waxer's drive motor).
While really small domains can be "squeezed out" by their neighbors (perhaps eventually attenuating really high frequency material and/or resulting in a bit of cross-talk between layers in the tape as wound for storage)
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Clever people have used scanners to take a picture of a phonograph record and then play the image of the grooves.
They have smart phones that can fake swiping a mag stripe card, just by holding it up near the reader.
What smart phone can do that? (unless you mean contactless payment, but that has nothing to do with magstripe cards
I wouldn't be surprised if some clever person could figure out a way of playing the sound recorded on the tape without actually having to unwind the tape.
I'd be *very* surprised, since layer upon layer of magnetic tape is going to appear as noise to any technology that tries to read it without unwinding the tape.
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I wouldn't be surprised if some clever person could figure out a way of playing the sound recorded on the tape without actually having to unwind the tape.
You'd need something that can look in between the tape layers. I'd start with an MRI machine.
Obligatory link to William Basinski (Score:2)
So THAT'S why! (Score:3)
Recordings on old audio tapes won't be worth much in another 20 years, and some are already too degraded to play.
Looks like the RIAA was right all along -- THAT's why you should rebuy all of your music, because soon your original license to listen will have vanished.
"The palest ink is better than the best memory" -- but not when the ink seperates from the paper!
Wait -- does that mean my 8-track RAID array is in danger!?!
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Buy vinyl it lasts the longest. Recall that 78s from over 100 years ago are often playable. 50-60 year old 33s still play well and 33 rpm players are still made. In particular if you keep the vinyl in a cool place.
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Rights & Access This recording is protected by state copyright laws in the United States. The Library of Congress has obtained a license from rights holders to offer it as streamed audio only. Downloading is not permitted. The authorization of rights holders of the recording is required in order to obtain a copy of the recording. Contact jukebox@loc.gov for more information.
Of course the question who these "rights holders" are, and if anything was given in return for this "license", is unknown.
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Buy vinyl it lasts the longest. Recall that 78s from over 100 years ago are often playable.
And there are new turntables that play vinyl (and other disk) recordings without touching the groves, using laser light rather than a needle.
Laser Turntables Aren't That New (Score:2)
I read about the Finial laser turntable in '88, and by the time the new owner of the technology finally got them to market in the late '90's, I had gone CD and didn't care. But, I still have the LPs stored vertically, still have a turntable, and maybe one of these days I'll eBay an ELP laser turntable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Datacenter backups (Score:1)
Faraday effect (Score:2)
Couldn't they read the tapes using a frikkin' laser and the Faraday Effect [wikipedia.org]?