Is a wav file eternal? What is your digital archiving strategy?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Eric Altizer
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Eric Altizer said:
Okay so what is the life cycle of a DAT tape drive? Should we all be storing our wav files on DAT (digital audio tape) for the long term?
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NO!!! DATs are unreliable, and a tape that plays fine on one machine might not play well on another. I've experienced this firsthand and it's quite annoying. DATs played a crucial role in the development of digital audio, but its days are numbered (IMO).
 
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So far all my archiving has been to CD-R. Granted I have nothing older than 6 years stored this way but so far so good. I've never had an issue reloading an old project. I always save individual tracks at the exact same length (no punch ins floating around) so syncing them back up, even without the the original software multitracker is not an issue.
 
I don't think they are talk about "Audio" DAT machines, but rather really high end DATA DAT drives. At my job (REALLY high end software) all of our backups are to magnetic tape and it's really reliable. Of course the tape drives are like $2K (and SCSI to boot!)
You won't be "playing" the tape anywhere as it just stores data in tar format.
"tar cv <files>" is your friend!



MadAudio said:
NO!!! DATs are unreliable, and a tape that plays fine on one machine might not play well on another. I've experienced this firsthand and it's quite annoying. DATs played a crucial role in the development of digital audio, but it's days are numbered (IMO).
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Track Rat said:
So far all my archiving has been to CD-R. Granted I have nothing older than 6 years stored this way but so far so good. I've never had an issue reloading an old project. I always save individual tracks at the exact same length (no punch ins floating around) so syncing them back up, even without the the original software multitracker is not an issue.
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Sounds like many of us are and will be archiving to CD-R. It's hard to know how long they will last. Thankfully better technologies are emerging. For instance this year Kodak launched a Preservation range of CDs and DVDs that incorporate 24-Karet gold and under testing have shown to withstand 300 years of aging.
 
Interesting thread, haven't given thought to it, how does a CD-R degenerate actually ? I have some very cheap quality 6-8 yo burned CDs that I've tried recently (were unlabeled) and all data on it was readable, at least what I tried to read, so what's it's lifespan ?

Francis.
 
Eric Altizer said:
Sounds like many of us are and will be archiving to CD-R. It's hard to know how long they will last. Thankfully better technologies are emerging. For instance this year Kodak launched a Preservation range of CDs and DVDs that incorporate 24-Karet gold and under testing have shown to withstand 300 years of aging.
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See my remark above about MAM-A Gold Archive. They didn't just introduce that line, they have been doing it, and they hold a patent on their dye.

http://www.mam-a.com/products/gold/archive.html
 
gordone said:
I don't think they are talk about "Audio" DAT machines, but rather really high end DATA DAT drives. At my job (REALLY high end software) all of our backups are to magnetic tape and it's really reliable. Of course the tape drives are like $2K (and SCSI to boot!)
You won't be "playing" the tape anywhere as it just stores data in tar format.
"tar cv <files>" is your friend!
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Ooops, right you are. Good catch.
 
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