The media industry is losing old archives – every fifth hard drive with music from the 90s has failed due to age

Iron Mountain Enterprise Information Management Company specializes in records management, data destruction, data backup and recovery. According to the company, about a fifth of the hard drives containing music archives that Iron Mountain receives from the media industry for servicing have completely failed. Many unique records may be lost forever if they are not backed up on another medium.

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The migration to hard drives from tape began in the 2000s with the rise in popularity of multi-channel audio formats and the advent of music games such as Guitar Hero. These technologies required music labels to remaster many old tracks, during which they discovered that the analog tapes used to store the original recordings began to deteriorate, and some were not playable at all.

Even if the recordings on the tapes were completely intact, the problem arose of the lack of compatible equipment to play them back. As a result, the music industry has focused on moving its archives from analog tapes to digital media such as hard drives.

However, like tape, hard drives also deteriorate—most commercial drives are designed to last only three to five years. Even when stored under the most optimal conditions, archival drives will eventually fail. Unfortunately, most often the studio turns to archives only to find original master recordings for commercial use. It often turns out that the information on an archived hard drive cannot be restored.

«It’s so sad to see a hard drive arrive at a studio in a brand new case with packaging and tags on it,” says Robert Koszela, global director of strategic initiatives and growth for Iron Mountain Media & Archive Services. — Next to it is an external protected case with a hard drive. Outwardly everything is fine. And both of them are bricks.”

Researchers are constantly working on new technologies for storing archival data. There are even reports of a startup developing media with a service life of 5,000 years. However, until these media become available at affordable prices, the only thing that can be done to ensure the integrity of digital archives is to completely rewrite them to new media every three to five years.