A friend has a production company with an audio studio. He switched from reel to reel tape to hard files in the mid 1990s.

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He called me in panic yesterday when he couldn't access one of his original archival hard files.

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I went over and was able to "wake the drive" by tapping the hard file with the handle of a large screwdriver, I'd have used a plastic mallet if I'd had one.

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NOTE: Do not do this until every other trick has been tried! Some hard files have glass platters and I had to tap pretty damn hard and could easily have shattered glass platters. [How hard? Like driving a nail in concrete.]

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We were able to copy all the audio to a new drive but that raised a question...

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I've always said there are two types of hard files, those that have died and those that will.

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I warned him about the various ways hard files die, CD/DVD ROM rot, how audio tape can have the binder (glue) that holds the magnetic material (fancy rust) and become unusable.

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"Other then clay tablets with cuneiform, all media degrades over time."

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He also collects "tombstones". Not literally, he's a member of a local history group and they make paper tracings of the information on tombstones.

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I asked "How many are barely legible?"

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"Quite a few of the older ones."

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I have no idea what he's going to do, he's 78, well off financially and may decide to retire. That would be suboptimal for former clients but he is facing a nightmare in time alone to back up all the hard files. Since each client's data is on their hard file(s), I suggested he contact them and give them the hard files with the suggestion "Back this up today!"

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Most of us don't give much thought to preservation of archival data but maybe we should.

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Here are two links that look at the issue

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NOTE: I've avoided Apple products and have no idea what magic key strokes he's describing...and I'm happy to remain ignorant.

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Several friends have contacted me over the last 20 years with I-Omega zip drives with "Data I have to recover!"

I wished them luck and told them I have zero experience with zip drives and intend to keep it that way.

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I have had CD-R/DVD-R fail and 1 early commercial CD music disk lose 2 tracks. I was a bit irritated but found a new CD and tossed the old one.

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I have a large "archive." [if such a mess of unorganized data can qualify as an archive.] I haven't lost a drive, yet. I'm in the process of pulling the most important data to new hard drives. Since I have several Exabytes of data...yea it's a lot of unfun.

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I inherited 3 NTSC digital video editing systems after helping upgrade a local production house upgrade to digital. Digital video editing requires very fast RAID hard files, older hard files that were perfect for NTSC won't work. Not needing any video editing systems, I salvaged the drives and sold the stripped carcasses. The 'unlimited' storage allowed me to save anything online I found the least bit interesting. I'm having a difficult time separating the wheat from the chaff.

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What to save and what to let nature take her course....

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or just erase it all...

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