One of my wife's cousin is a bean counter.
Yea I know the shame of it. She was down to finalize my deceased mother in law's estate. [Don't die, it is a mess]
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I mentioned storing and backing up data archives.
Part of her duties is to serve on a committee that decides "What do we archive?" and "What archival media do we transfer?"
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She explained there are 4 primary costs to data archives.
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1) A space to store the archive, space isn't free and archives typically require climate control and access security.
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2) The cost of backup hardware and media, which may be extensive. Let's say for some insane reason you just discovered 1000 5.25 and 8 inch floppies, even worse the 8 inch are about 50/50 hard and soft sector.
You'd have to locate working drives, I don't think there are any 8 inch drives that read both hard and soft sector.
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[They ran into this and decided none of the data was worth transferring, it was I-Omega Zip drives and a bunch of floppies.]
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3) you'd have the cost of the backup media.
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4) There is the labor costs of actually doing the backups, and a space to do the transfer.
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So, you have to ask yourself, "Is the data worth the time and expense to transfer?"
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Most of my archive probably falls under "Why in the hell did I print that webpage to PDF?"
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Consider....
MTV/Paramount deleted ~30 years worth of old programs.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2024/06/26/mtv-news-archives-deleted/74225789007/
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A youtube video on the subject
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLdi7Kp62bU
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Do a net search "youtube deleted 30 years of video" for more stories then you'd believe.
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[Some people are upset because the early history of hip-hop has been lost. I'm so unsad I can giggle.]
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I worked in a media center with several tens of thousands of hours of film, slides, photos, shellac phono records, various audio tape formats and various formats of video.
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I worked with video so I'm way too familiar with the problems of video tape.
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Our oldest video tape was Japanese 1/2 EIJ, open reel to reel video recorder. By the time I was hired in 1979 we couldn't locate a working machine to transfer the video tape. EIJ tapes suffered from striction.
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Our film chain died in 1995, a projector for NTSC TV has a pull down of 5 per second instead of the standard 4. We couldn't locate repair parts and the campus machine shop tried but couldn't fabricate a replacement part with the required accuracy.
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We had several hundred hours of Ampex 2 inch quadraplex. The tape heads were good for a few hundred hours and then had to be sent off for a rebuild. The only company that did the rebuilding went out of business and we faced the tough decision "Which tapes do we transfer?"
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We drew up a priority list and copied just over 70 tapes to U-matic 3/4" and Betacam (not home Beta!). This disrupted our normal operations for over a month.
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Then they nuked the entire media department and we shut everything down per written orders. "Everything" meant the HVAC. The archive was destroyed by the first frost. The room the archive was in would reach temperatures of 130 without HVAC.
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So they had no issue with "What do we save?" because it was all ruined.
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I attended a meeting 6 months after they shut us down, I charged them big time, and it was decided "We should have kept the TV department open until we backed up valuable media and transferred it to the official university archive."
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It would have taken the entire engineering staff 6 to 12 months to transfer the most important videos.
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Since they were in a severe budget crunch, was the lost video worth preserving?
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Don't ask me, I was an engineer and my opinion was irrelevant. ?
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I hope I've made it clear backing up data is important but not cost free and not all data needs to be archived.
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I'm a bit OCD and still have report cards from elementary school. The comments by my teachers are high humor.
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My wife wonders why some of my teachers didn't just strangle me. They did not approve of my enjoyment of 'bail out.' That's where you swing as high as you can, release and land in a paratroopers roll. I was school camp. Which is hilarious given my fear of heights.
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[We so won't go into Terry's cryptography that tried to pass as proper writting.]
