Music is Being Lost to Failing Hard Drives, Reminding Us of a Few Best Practices

Nostalgia is a powerful force. It can drive us to look to the past for things we once loved, such as the music we listened to over the years. However, what if the music you loved was lost forever?

This could be the case for many, as older hard drives that archive this music have been discovered to have failed. Let’s examine the situation to see what lessons any small-to-medium-sized business can learn.

Meet Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services

Iron Mountain specializes in data management and storage services. It works with various industries to fulfill their document management and digital transformation needs, including the music industry. Iron Mountain provides archived storage for media assets for this particular client base. As a result, they store thousands upon thousands of hard disk drives that their clients asked them to use in the 1990s.

During a routine survey of its storage vaults a few years ago, the provider discovered that of these thousands upon thousands of HDDs, approximately a fifth—yes, 20% of them—were unreadable.

A Brief History of Why HDDs are the Standard Format

Ironically, the migration to HDD as the standard storage format was originally due to a similar problem. Masters, once converted to the preferred commercial format of the time, were put into storage as tape. Believe it or not, the tape degradation these masters suffered was discovered thanks to the Guitar Hero video game franchise and 5.1 surround sound. Artists wanted to make sure their work was compatible with these new platforms, but they found that their tapes weren’t all in working condition. Some had degraded, storage space conditions damaged some, and some were obsolete, having been produced for certain technologies in formats that were not easily played. Some were just missing.

We’d be the first to say that tape is far from the ideal storage medium, and we’re willing to guess that anyone who lost their masters in this way would easily agree.

As a result, the industry quickly shifted to HDD-based masters… but even this has its issues, as Iron Mountain discovered and has been trying to spread the word about.

What’s the Problem with HDDs?

Let’s say there was a nu metal band called Letters From Charlie of the Bears that had its heyday in the ‘90s, and their masters were saved via HDD. Letters From Charlie of the Bears ends up breaking up as the demand for nu metal wanes in the ‘aughts, unlike their many contemporaries that adjusted their music to match demand. However, with nu metal returning to fashion nowadays, Letters From Charlie of the Bears gets back together. They decide to remaster some of their old albums to capitalize on the renewed interest and go back on tour… only to find that the hard drives that once contained their work have gone kaput.

A few issues with HDD archival storage could lead to this scenario. First and foremost, these hard drives were never really designed with long-term archival storage in mind. Plus, the whole thing is rendered inoperational if any moving parts inside the drive fail. Older file formats have also made these master files difficult—if not impossible—to access.

What Does This Mean for Your Business?

There are two key lessons to be learned by the average business in Chicagoland from this situation.

First, the importance of backup. As lovely as it would be to have technology that can inherently be trusted, and as hard as IT providers like Preferred work to keep business technology functional, the hard truth is that you can never fully trust your data storage. As a result, you must have a backup strategy that ensures you always have access to the most up-to-date version of your data and that features data redundancy to ensure that—even if something happens to one of your backup copies—you always have a working set of data to utilize.

Of course, having a backup is one thing. Knowing you can rely on it is quite another. We recommend that you occasionally test your backups by trying to operate solely from what you have stored in them. This is the second lesson to be learned.

We’re Here to Help

As part of our IT services, we offer comprehensive backup preparations and management, helping to protect your business against disasters of all kinds through adherence to key best practices. Find out how you can benefit from this by giving us a call at 708-781-7110.