10 ms·

Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

237 points by happy-go-lucky 7y ago

csours 7y ago
Red Letter Media fans rejoice! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_igaLv7ro8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_igaLv7ro8o
allovernow 7y ago
How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From what little I've read, all of the media accessable to the layman has an archive lifetime of less than 30 years before physical degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever. That makes for a brittle civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge is stored on media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  If you want data to survive you've always needed to copy it. Digital storage just makes that easier to do in bulk. Copying Bibles was a full time task for huge teams of monks but you can (and should) make backups routinely on a daily or weekly basis with barely a thought.
  - crmrc114 7y ago
    This is a huge problem for any data- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-to-send-a-message-1000-years-to-the-future/385720/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-t... Even communication of a simple warning message for yucca mountain and WIPP proved how hard it was going to be to communicate danger over 10000 years from now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin...
  - CaptArmchair 7y ago
    The LOCKSS project is an approach used in university networks around the world to preserve research data for the long term. https://www.lockss.org/ https://www.lockss.org/ The big issue isn't the technology, it's the vast amounts of data that are being created at this point. Storage is cheap, but the labor that goes into managing the longevity of datasets isn't: it's essentially continually keeping your infrastructure up-to-date whilst also ensuring the integrity and readability of the datasets as was intended when they were first created. It implies regular checks of bit integrity, readability of your data, checking that you can restore your data, ensuring that you can access the data, making sure that you can find the data and everything is catalogued, ensuring that you have the rights and license to use the data,... When it comes to physical archives of the past, you have to be aware of your own survivorship bias. We only have an idea of what is preserved to the extent that documents are archived, recorded and thus discoverable. What we do not know is how much knowledge and information was lost to the past. When you look at documents, you're always limited to what's there. And when you hit the boundaries of what's there, then you may have indications that there was far more in the past, but you have to conclude: sadly that's lost. Either because it is physically lost, or because it might be somewhere in the archive but it's not registered yet in a catalogue and therefor not accessible. That's why I think that making backups with "barely a thought" is only as effective as to the extent to which you have organized your data, used accessible / readable data formats and filesystems. For instance, most people these days generate endless streams of photos with their digital devices, which then get automagically uploaded to cloud services. And that's great. The downside of that is that your ability to find a specific picture from 5 years ago is entirely restricted to the extent that you were able to organize and add specific metadata to that picture. Let alone, if you did take the opportunity to do so. That's why I advise people to sit down, and take time to go through their digital albums to pick the nicest or most important pictures they have, print them out on quality photo paper in several copies and store them with labels in albums at different physical locations. When it comes to longevity, your physical albums will still be accessible to your descendants some 70 or 100 years down the line. Something that isn't remotely guaranteed by cloud solutions. And that's just photos. Consider e-mail or the countless of closed messaging apps you have been using these past years. And then scale the problem beyond the personal but to entirety of large organizations, many of which are required by law to keep an archive of their documents, correspondence and so on, not just for decades but sometimes also for perpetuity.
- aglavine 7y ago
  I have 30 year old CDs that play as good as the first time, as well as older vinyl discs. I'm sure I own 20 year old DVDs in same condition.
  - ChrisArchitect 7y ago
    same, but I've also seen some cheaper makes of CDRs break down after 20 years and the storage layer crack etc.
    - sigstoat 7y ago
      quite. the writable discs don't last nearly as long. i had a pile of writable DVDs that were unreadable 8 years later when i went back to fetch the data from them.
  - iamphilrae 7y ago
    Audio CDs can survive a bit of degradation to the odd data bits here or there; the music will just skip the millisecond of missing data and your ears won’t notice. Likewise with vinyl. Data discs on the other hand have the issue that if a single data bit is lost, a whole file could be corrupted, especially if it’s a zipped file. In addition, printed audio CDs are of a different build than CD-Rs which have been found to not be as resistant to moisture and light.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      It takes more than a single bit--there are Huffman codes built into the spec, but it is certainly possible for the bits to degrade enough to render a sector or even the whole disc unreadable.
      - pmiller2 7y ago
        If you're serious about using optical media as archival storage, you can mitigate this by incorporating your own error correcting codes into the data storage format.
      - 7y ago
- quag 7y ago
  After going down this rabbit hole, I concluded that M-Disc is the right trade off at the moment. They’re not too expensive, the writers are available, they’ll last, and they could be reverse engineered if discovered in the future. The second choice is using hard drives (easily available) and every so often power them up and copy data to new drives. If you have a small quantity of data, then encode and laser print onto paper, with a font designed for optical scanning or QR code’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
  - eitland 7y ago
    Seems hard to get hold of M-DISCs now. Are they still produced?
    - zoonosis 7y ago
      I see many listings for them on US Amazon.
      - eitland 7y ago
        Tried again and now I can see them for sale here as well. Thanks!
  - Seenso 7y ago
    > They’re not too expensive, the writers are available, they’ll last, and they could be reverse engineered if discovered in the future. IIRC, the writers for M-DISCs are special, but the reader can be any DVD or Blu-ray drive. Honestly, I think the biggest consideration for digital archival media isn't so much the longevity of the media, but the future availability of equipment to read it. That's one of the biggest benefits of paper, IMHO. Besides being very well-understood material, nearly everyone is born with the necessary reading equipment and the decoding software is very common.
    - reificator 7y ago
      > the decoding software is very common. [Citation needed]
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Do what archivists do - copy. The challenge is keeping things accessible. Only copying does that for electronic media. That includes getting things like photos printed.
  - allovernow 7y ago
    How many times can you copy digital media before it degrades beyond error correction? I don't know the error rate per copied bit. I think this is an excellent place for neural networks. They can preserve vast amounts of data compactly for many data types because they statistically compress high level abstract data which can then be used to fill in regions with high error rate, although if you did that at a large scale you'd probably end up with some constant error rate fluctuating around the average true value. All indications point to the fact that we seem to be working against the unstoppable Force of entropy - indefinite error free preservation of data is ultimately impossible.
    - bobthepanda 7y ago
      Considering we can read parchments thousands of years old, and stone tablets going back even further, perhaps we should focus efforts on copying what we can to the time-tested preserved data formats.
      - FillardMillmore 7y ago
        Im going to assume this is tongue-in-cheek, but if you happen to find a way to copy Mario 64 to a stone tablet, I'd love to hear about it.
        EwanG 7y ago
        Not THAT difficult - assuming you have enough stone tablets. I mean the program code exists. The problem I think you'd have (and true of most of these digital artifacts) is all the other hardware and software you would have to similarly encode to be able to recreate the machine and OS capable of running it...
- allovernow 7y ago
  Honestly, paper lasts thousands of years. Maybe the solution is microprint and OCR? How long does microfiche last?
  - ThomasBHickey 7y ago
    https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6.-reformatting/6.1-microfilm-and-microfiche https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6... "500+ years under proper storage conditions"
- orbital-decay 7y ago
  Digital storage depends on a long and complicated chain of formats, standards, technologies, businesses, software, services etc which come and go every decade or two, or even more often. Any of it is lost, and your archive isn't an archive anymore. So to store something long-term, you have to eliminate single points of failure, such as encodings, formats, and even human languages. It can be completely non-obvious, and the physical media isn't the most important one. Naturally, "civilizational scale archival" is only feasible for a proper archival organization such as a museum, a library or an archive. As a person, you can't have this. You can use the archival-grade media like M-Disc, but don't expect to put something on it and recover it 50 years later easily. You have to design the process to validate and migrate the data every once in a while. Digital storage can't offer something comparable to a simple printed photo. > when the vast majority of our knowledge ... would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity. The vast majority of our knowledge is encoded in the societal and economic context. There's simply no way to translate it to any media, and any disruption would be the end of it.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Do what I do - copy it forward every couple years onto new media. My oldest files are from 1977 - proof: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10 https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10 My files have gone from magtape to 8" floppy to various 5.25" floppy to 3.5 floppy to zip drives to cdroms to dvdroms, then to hard disks of ever-increasing size. (My old hard drives are completely unreadable now.) I'm sorry I never kept my punch card decks. I'm sure there was nothing but crap on them, but it would be fun to see what kind of crap it was.
  - dmix 7y ago
    Fortran always seems like such an odd looking language to a modern developer like myself, who's learned a fair share of languages. I want to sit down and figure it out one day given how prominent it was (and still is for many critical systems).
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      The Fortran I used for Empire was FORTRAN-10, a DEC variant with many extensions to the then-Standard FORTRAN IV. There was an earlier Empire I wrote in BASIC, but alas it was lost. Some of its vestiges remain in the Fortran version, such as a variable named Z6. (Variables in that BASIC were one letter and one digit.)
      - dmix 7y ago
        What do you program in today?
        bachmeier 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright
        dmix 7y ago
        Well, that certainly answered my question! Thanks for the heads up.
- eaurouge 7y ago
  Not particularly user friendly, yet, but Arweave [0] was built specifically for this use case. 0. https://www.arweave.org/archiving.html https://www.arweave.org/archiving.html
  - EwanG 7y ago
    Sounds a lot like Archive.org? Am I missing something?
    - penguinpalace 7y ago
      Yeah, it's similar but Archive.org relies on servers to store information, whereas Arweave is a decentralised peer-to-peer network that offers permanent data storage. Arweave are in talks with them and are working with the IA to timestamp all of their collections.
- jointpdf 7y ago
  It may not be “accessible to the layman” (yet?), but this seems rather intriguing: “The memory crystal is capable of storing up to 360 terabytes of data for billions of years.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
- rogerdpack 7y ago
  maybe forever.com ...
- slim 7y ago
  I've always wondered what makes micro SD cards not suitable for long term storage. What makes them decay
  - ta999999171 7y ago
    They store things the same way SSDs, do, with electrical charge. It weakens. That's a shit explanation, I'd definitely look up "how does flash storage degrade".
  - rasz 7y ago
    Its flash memory, physically pushing electrons into a jar and hoping to count them later before all leak out. Endurance tests of SSD drives showed unplugging a worn drive for a couple of days was enough to lose all data. Not to mention SD cards usually get the lowest grade of flash memory.
    - nicolaslem 7y ago
      I never understood why SD cards are so unreliable (or a least have this reputation) as they are usually used in cameras to store pictures. Something that people don't really joke with.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
smhenderson 7y ago
I'm almost afraid to write this as I fear it will be removed soon and am surprised it hasn't been already but this was the first thing I looked for... https://archive.org/details/star-wars-ONTV-Early-80s/Star+Wars+ONTV+Early+80s/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB https://archive.org/details/star-wars-ONTV-Early-80s/Star+Wa...
- sproketboy 7y ago
  Cool. But I was looking for the Christmas Special. ;)
- pkroll 7y ago
  To hell with that ugliness, go all-out and look for a torrent of Star Wars Despecialized Editions. As good as you can get the originals, these days.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    Team Negative 1's scan & restorations of 35mm prints are my favorites. Empire's not done yet, but the other two are.
    - gsich 7y ago
      There is some Despecial version for Empire. But in comparison Empire is also the least modified.
  - Seenso 7y ago
    > To hell with that ugliness, go all-out and look for a torrent of Star Wars Despecialized Editions. As good as you can get the originals, these days. The true original is the one my parents taped off of TV when I was a kid, commercials and all.
  - smhenderson 7y ago
    Oh, I agree, but it's still a nice blast from the past watching it this way. I was 10 when this came on TV and I still remember the thrill of watching it. I was five when it came out in theaters. I had an older brother who got to go see it there and he kept telling me how awesome it was but I had to wait five years to see it! So this is more of a "oh yeah, that's what TV used to look like" moment than an actual "I want to watch the original Star Wars" again... I have a friend at work who actually scored a pristine, never opened VHS copy and of course we ripped that sucker open and watched the day he got it. And we go back once in a while and watch it again, sometimes running it along side the new ones so we can spot and discuss the differences. Fun stuff on a Saturday night!
AcerbicZero 7y ago
I prefer RedLetterMedia's use of VHS tapes. They use them to play a terrible version of Jenga, where they watch all the random VHS tapes collected by the "winner". Also for some reason, Macaulay Culkin seems to be hanging out with them a lot. Maybe Milwaukie is just that much fun? "Junka" -> https://youtu.be/9M39zY9OXFA https://youtu.be/9M39zY9OXFA
- cabaalis 7y ago
  The best part about RLM's Best of the Worst is that they all seem to hate doing it. There was one episode where they got terribly drunk and had to stop filming and come back a few days later.
bluetidepro 7y ago
Is there an easy way to download results from that vault in mass (not having to click into each item)? Or is that not available? EDIT: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/archive-downloader/elhoagejfapekjaefenmngphliikoace https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/archive-downloader... - It looks like that's a solid option to use a Chrome extension for it.
- humaniania 7y ago
  For random Chrome extensions, I use a sandbox session (windows 10 feature), just in case.
- rsync 7y ago
  "Is there an easy way to download results from that vault in mass ..." This is neither a rebuke nor pedantry - I genuinely hope this will be useful to you: It's "en masse".
josteink 7y ago
The amount of RedLetterMedia comments in this thread is seriously telling about the correlation between hackers and b-movie fans. And oh yeah. Guilty myself.
ggffryuuj 7y ago
My step mom was recently going through a bunch of old vhs tapes looking for wedding footage of her mother’s wedding. 99% of the tapes are television from the early 2000s. She was going to just throw them away! So now I’ve got 30 tapes of early 2000s gold. I’m going to digitize them and upload them to YouTube.
jcomis 7y ago
I love stuff like this. Here's one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/user/5ninthavenueproject https://www.youtube.com/user/5ninthavenueproject
- themodelplumber 7y ago
  You reminded me of this spy film, which starts with a shot of a VHS recorder! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqFYFT1nqp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqFYFT1nqp8
andrewstuart 7y ago
There would be all sorts of weird stuff on them. Young people probably would not know that watching VHS tapes anything could happen because they got reused. So you'd be watching a movie and halfway through it would suddenly switch over to a shuttle launch or a music video or a documentary or something cause someone decided to record something else at that point. I once recorded a three hour British detective show. I watched it for three hours and it got to the final scene to reveal whodunnit and the tape ran out. It's great that they are archiving the old content but I don't miss VHS in the least.
- themodelplumber 7y ago
  > I watched it for three hours and it got to the final scene to reveal whodunnit and the tape ran out. I ran into one of these on Youtube just a couple of weeks ago. The reaction in the comments was something less than amused. (Bittersweet memories of taping over some of Mom's seemingly non-important video in order to record...what was it, the first X-files episode? A _Wings_ episode about a favorite jet? Something like that. But man, she was not happy.)
  - GuardianCaveman 7y ago
    You’re the first person in any forum online I’ve seen reference Wings. My dads friend used to call my dad to tell him it was on and he’d switch from whatever ninja turtles / golden girls / simpsons episode we were watching. We despised wings! But actually it’s a great show.
    - themodelplumber 7y ago
      Funny. I hadn't searched for it online much but I can understand its lack of traction. It was like a lot of commercial promotional clips spliced together, in some ways. It left a lot of questions unanswered, too! But it was great for an overview and the theme music will be forever engraved in my memory, right next to the _Strike Commander_ theme. :-)
- isbjorn16 7y ago
ris 7y ago
Related: rescuing historic teletext pages from VHS recordings of broadcast TV: https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext
- jamiek88 7y ago
  WOW! What a brilliant idea! So obvious now, the teletext data must have been embedded into the tv picture thus captured by VHS recording. This got me very excited, I'd love to rebuild the old Ceefax 101 pages.
  - ris 7y ago
    Search ebay for "used vhs" and start shopping.
  - kaetemi 7y ago
    I remember trying out teletext from a VHS whe I was a kid. Was interesting that it worked. Lots of glitches in the data, though.
Zenst 7y ago
With the number of people chastised in later life for old tweets, this could be interesting. However, it's such recordings that have saved many an old TV show as the studios reused tapes as well. Kinda how few Doctor Who episodes got saved.
subdane 7y ago
There's a great doc that came out last year on Marion Stokes, who recorded decades of television. Her footage is being added to The Internet Archive https://blog.archive.org/tag/marion-stokes/ https://blog.archive.org/tag/marion-stokes/
WalterBright 7y ago
My father left me several hundred 6 hour VHS tapes. I had no idea what was on them because he'd kept an index, but it was mostly missing. There was a lot of interesting random stuff on them, mostly from the 80's. The bits of stuff he recorded is like a peek inside his brain :-)
dmix 7y ago
This would be great audio/visual sampling content for musicians and the like.
WalterBright 7y ago
Oh darn. Still no "Dance Fever" episodes from the early 80's. There are a handful on youtube, but not the interesting ones.
mml 7y ago
The "removed a rib" thing was started by Gabriele D’Annunzio, father of Italian fascism. Most likely untrue, but a rumor also most likely to be spread by its subject. Check out https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/behind-the-bastards/e/66732817?autoplay=true https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/behind-the-bastards/e/66732... for the details behind this truly unlikely person.
olivermarks 7y ago
What is the copyright situation with these tapes? I get the value of archiving and preserving digitally but if I'd invested time and money creating a vhs catalog of titles I'd be unhappy to see them suddenly all over youtube (assuming they had some appeal of course) with no ability to profit from them.
- themodelplumber 7y ago
  Good question. At least on the surface it seems only fair that at some point, after the archivist has performed a reasonably thorough search for copyright maintenance, the burden of justification then switches over to the (latest?) copyright claimant. "Yes, we have the internet now. Yes, if you intend to enforce your copyright, your claim should be searchable via the internet. Either way you may still have to reach out and publish notice of your claim." That kind of thing. Kind of like Gutenberg.org texts, with their disclaimer that "we checked and couldn't find any renewal of copyright," or whatever it says nowadays...
- epanchin 7y ago
  Don't you think 20 years is enough time to profit from a creation? Copywrite law lasts so long, it makes little sense.
  - olivermarks 7y ago
    It's a tricky one. If I flew around the world with expensive camera gear and edited up some kind of big budget travel video I'd be a lot more upset about seeing it free than if I had made a 'origami how to' video in 1989 that was very low budget...
- monocasa 7y ago
  Archive.org is a library in the state of California, and legally has a little carte blanche when it comes to copyright.
- incompatible 7y ago
  Presumably they are all copyrighted, and presumably IA will take them down if it gets a DMCA notification. Perhaps they could then use a library workaround and make them available to one person at a time, or whatever.
cabaalis 7y ago
Three (edit:Two) full seasons of Salute Your Shorts makes this very much worth it.
LocalH 7y ago
I hope they’re capturing this at full resolution and preserving the full 60i signal. Too many times, people think VHS is 320x240 and capture accordingly, dropping half the temporal resolution from the get go. Even though there’s not a ton of horizontal evolution, a full D1 resolution capture will represent the tape much better than a half-resolution capture (but half-D1 would still be better than 320 or 352 by 240).

Red Letter Media fans rejoice! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_igaLv7ro8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_igaLv7ro8o

How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From what little I've read, all of the media accessable to the layman has an archive lifetime of less than 30 years before physical degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever. That makes for a brittle civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge is stored on media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity.

tialaramex 7y ago
If you want data to survive you've always needed to copy it. Digital storage just makes that easier to do in bulk. Copying Bibles was a full time task for huge teams of monks but you can (and should) make backups routinely on a daily or weekly basis with barely a thought.
- crmrc114 7y ago
  This is a huge problem for any data- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-to-send-a-message-1000-years-to-the-future/385720/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-t... Even communication of a simple warning message for yucca mountain and WIPP proved how hard it was going to be to communicate danger over 10000 years from now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin...
- CaptArmchair 7y ago
  The LOCKSS project is an approach used in university networks around the world to preserve research data for the long term. https://www.lockss.org/ https://www.lockss.org/ The big issue isn't the technology, it's the vast amounts of data that are being created at this point. Storage is cheap, but the labor that goes into managing the longevity of datasets isn't: it's essentially continually keeping your infrastructure up-to-date whilst also ensuring the integrity and readability of the datasets as was intended when they were first created. It implies regular checks of bit integrity, readability of your data, checking that you can restore your data, ensuring that you can access the data, making sure that you can find the data and everything is catalogued, ensuring that you have the rights and license to use the data,... When it comes to physical archives of the past, you have to be aware of your own survivorship bias. We only have an idea of what is preserved to the extent that documents are archived, recorded and thus discoverable. What we do not know is how much knowledge and information was lost to the past. When you look at documents, you're always limited to what's there. And when you hit the boundaries of what's there, then you may have indications that there was far more in the past, but you have to conclude: sadly that's lost. Either because it is physically lost, or because it might be somewhere in the archive but it's not registered yet in a catalogue and therefor not accessible. That's why I think that making backups with "barely a thought" is only as effective as to the extent to which you have organized your data, used accessible / readable data formats and filesystems. For instance, most people these days generate endless streams of photos with their digital devices, which then get automagically uploaded to cloud services. And that's great. The downside of that is that your ability to find a specific picture from 5 years ago is entirely restricted to the extent that you were able to organize and add specific metadata to that picture. Let alone, if you did take the opportunity to do so. That's why I advise people to sit down, and take time to go through their digital albums to pick the nicest or most important pictures they have, print them out on quality photo paper in several copies and store them with labels in albums at different physical locations. When it comes to longevity, your physical albums will still be accessible to your descendants some 70 or 100 years down the line. Something that isn't remotely guaranteed by cloud solutions. And that's just photos. Consider e-mail or the countless of closed messaging apps you have been using these past years. And then scale the problem beyond the personal but to entirety of large organizations, many of which are required by law to keep an archive of their documents, correspondence and so on, not just for decades but sometimes also for perpetuity.
aglavine 7y ago
I have 30 year old CDs that play as good as the first time, as well as older vinyl discs. I'm sure I own 20 year old DVDs in same condition.
- ChrisArchitect 7y ago
  same, but I've also seen some cheaper makes of CDRs break down after 20 years and the storage layer crack etc.
  - sigstoat 7y ago
    quite. the writable discs don't last nearly as long. i had a pile of writable DVDs that were unreadable 8 years later when i went back to fetch the data from them.
- iamphilrae 7y ago
  Audio CDs can survive a bit of degradation to the odd data bits here or there; the music will just skip the millisecond of missing data and your ears won’t notice. Likewise with vinyl. Data discs on the other hand have the issue that if a single data bit is lost, a whole file could be corrupted, especially if it’s a zipped file. In addition, printed audio CDs are of a different build than CD-Rs which have been found to not be as resistant to moisture and light.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    It takes more than a single bit--there are Huffman codes built into the spec, but it is certainly possible for the bits to degrade enough to render a sector or even the whole disc unreadable.
    - pmiller2 7y ago
      If you're serious about using optical media as archival storage, you can mitigate this by incorporating your own error correcting codes into the data storage format.
    - 7y ago
quag 7y ago
After going down this rabbit hole, I concluded that M-Disc is the right trade off at the moment. They’re not too expensive, the writers are available, they’ll last, and they could be reverse engineered if discovered in the future. The second choice is using hard drives (easily available) and every so often power them up and copy data to new drives. If you have a small quantity of data, then encode and laser print onto paper, with a font designed for optical scanning or QR code’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- eitland 7y ago
  Seems hard to get hold of M-DISCs now. Are they still produced?
  - zoonosis 7y ago
    I see many listings for them on US Amazon.
    - eitland 7y ago
      Tried again and now I can see them for sale here as well. Thanks!
- Seenso 7y ago
  > They’re not too expensive, the writers are available, they’ll last, and they could be reverse engineered if discovered in the future. IIRC, the writers for M-DISCs are special, but the reader can be any DVD or Blu-ray drive. Honestly, I think the biggest consideration for digital archival media isn't so much the longevity of the media, but the future availability of equipment to read it. That's one of the biggest benefits of paper, IMHO. Besides being very well-understood material, nearly everyone is born with the necessary reading equipment and the decoding software is very common.
  - reificator 7y ago
    > the decoding software is very common. [Citation needed]
Spooky23 7y ago
Do what archivists do - copy. The challenge is keeping things accessible. Only copying does that for electronic media. That includes getting things like photos printed.
- allovernow 7y ago
  How many times can you copy digital media before it degrades beyond error correction? I don't know the error rate per copied bit. I think this is an excellent place for neural networks. They can preserve vast amounts of data compactly for many data types because they statistically compress high level abstract data which can then be used to fill in regions with high error rate, although if you did that at a large scale you'd probably end up with some constant error rate fluctuating around the average true value. All indications point to the fact that we seem to be working against the unstoppable Force of entropy - indefinite error free preservation of data is ultimately impossible.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    Considering we can read parchments thousands of years old, and stone tablets going back even further, perhaps we should focus efforts on copying what we can to the time-tested preserved data formats.
    - FillardMillmore 7y ago
      Im going to assume this is tongue-in-cheek, but if you happen to find a way to copy Mario 64 to a stone tablet, I'd love to hear about it.
      - EwanG 7y ago
        Not THAT difficult - assuming you have enough stone tablets. I mean the program code exists. The problem I think you'd have (and true of most of these digital artifacts) is all the other hardware and software you would have to similarly encode to be able to recreate the machine and OS capable of running it...
allovernow 7y ago
Honestly, paper lasts thousands of years. Maybe the solution is microprint and OCR? How long does microfiche last?
- ThomasBHickey 7y ago
  https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6.-reformatting/6.1-microfilm-and-microfiche https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6... "500+ years under proper storage conditions"
orbital-decay 7y ago
Digital storage depends on a long and complicated chain of formats, standards, technologies, businesses, software, services etc which come and go every decade or two, or even more often. Any of it is lost, and your archive isn't an archive anymore. So to store something long-term, you have to eliminate single points of failure, such as encodings, formats, and even human languages. It can be completely non-obvious, and the physical media isn't the most important one. Naturally, "civilizational scale archival" is only feasible for a proper archival organization such as a museum, a library or an archive. As a person, you can't have this. You can use the archival-grade media like M-Disc, but don't expect to put something on it and recover it 50 years later easily. You have to design the process to validate and migrate the data every once in a while. Digital storage can't offer something comparable to a simple printed photo. > when the vast majority of our knowledge ... would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity. The vast majority of our knowledge is encoded in the societal and economic context. There's simply no way to translate it to any media, and any disruption would be the end of it.
WalterBright 7y ago
Do what I do - copy it forward every couple years onto new media. My oldest files are from 1977 - proof: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10 https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10 My files have gone from magtape to 8" floppy to various 5.25" floppy to 3.5 floppy to zip drives to cdroms to dvdroms, then to hard disks of ever-increasing size. (My old hard drives are completely unreadable now.) I'm sorry I never kept my punch card decks. I'm sure there was nothing but crap on them, but it would be fun to see what kind of crap it was.
- dmix 7y ago
  Fortran always seems like such an odd looking language to a modern developer like myself, who's learned a fair share of languages. I want to sit down and figure it out one day given how prominent it was (and still is for many critical systems).
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    The Fortran I used for Empire was FORTRAN-10, a DEC variant with many extensions to the then-Standard FORTRAN IV. There was an earlier Empire I wrote in BASIC, but alas it was lost. Some of its vestiges remain in the Fortran version, such as a variable named Z6. (Variables in that BASIC were one letter and one digit.)
    - dmix 7y ago
      What do you program in today?
      - bachmeier 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright
        dmix 7y ago
        Well, that certainly answered my question! Thanks for the heads up.
eaurouge 7y ago
Not particularly user friendly, yet, but Arweave [0] was built specifically for this use case. 0. https://www.arweave.org/archiving.html https://www.arweave.org/archiving.html
- EwanG 7y ago
  Sounds a lot like Archive.org? Am I missing something?
  - penguinpalace 7y ago
    Yeah, it's similar but Archive.org relies on servers to store information, whereas Arweave is a decentralised peer-to-peer network that offers permanent data storage. Arweave are in talks with them and are working with the IA to timestamp all of their collections.
jointpdf 7y ago
It may not be “accessible to the layman” (yet?), but this seems rather intriguing: “The memory crystal is capable of storing up to 360 terabytes of data for billions of years.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
rogerdpack 7y ago
maybe forever.com ...
slim 7y ago
I've always wondered what makes micro SD cards not suitable for long term storage. What makes them decay
- ta999999171 7y ago
  They store things the same way SSDs, do, with electrical charge. It weakens. That's a shit explanation, I'd definitely look up "how does flash storage degrade".
- rasz 7y ago
  Its flash memory, physically pushing electrons into a jar and hoping to count them later before all leak out. Endurance tests of SSD drives showed unplugging a worn drive for a couple of days was enough to lose all data. Not to mention SD cards usually get the lowest grade of flash memory.
  - nicolaslem 7y ago
    I never understood why SD cards are so unreliable (or a least have this reputation) as they are usually used in cameras to store pictures. Something that people don't really joke with.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

smhenderson 7y ago

I'm almost afraid to write this as I fear it will be removed soon and am surprised it hasn't been already but this was the first thing I looked for... https://archive.org/details/star-wars-ONTV-Early-80s/Star+Wars+ONTV+Early+80s/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB https://archive.org/details/star-wars-ONTV-Early-80s/Star+Wa...

sproketboy 7y ago
Cool. But I was looking for the Christmas Special. ;)
pkroll 7y ago
To hell with that ugliness, go all-out and look for a torrent of Star Wars Despecialized Editions. As good as you can get the originals, these days.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  Team Negative 1's scan & restorations of 35mm prints are my favorites. Empire's not done yet, but the other two are.
  - gsich 7y ago
    There is some Despecial version for Empire. But in comparison Empire is also the least modified.
- Seenso 7y ago
  > To hell with that ugliness, go all-out and look for a torrent of Star Wars Despecialized Editions. As good as you can get the originals, these days. The true original is the one my parents taped off of TV when I was a kid, commercials and all.
- smhenderson 7y ago
  Oh, I agree, but it's still a nice blast from the past watching it this way. I was 10 when this came on TV and I still remember the thrill of watching it. I was five when it came out in theaters. I had an older brother who got to go see it there and he kept telling me how awesome it was but I had to wait five years to see it! So this is more of a "oh yeah, that's what TV used to look like" moment than an actual "I want to watch the original Star Wars" again... I have a friend at work who actually scored a pristine, never opened VHS copy and of course we ripped that sucker open and watched the day he got it. And we go back once in a while and watch it again, sometimes running it along side the new ones so we can spot and discuss the differences. Fun stuff on a Saturday night!

AcerbicZero 7y ago

I prefer RedLetterMedia's use of VHS tapes. They use them to play a terrible version of Jenga, where they watch all the random VHS tapes collected by the "winner". Also for some reason, Macaulay Culkin seems to be hanging out with them a lot. Maybe Milwaukie is just that much fun? "Junka" -> https://youtu.be/9M39zY9OXFA https://youtu.be/9M39zY9OXFA

cabaalis 7y ago
The best part about RLM's Best of the Worst is that they all seem to hate doing it. There was one episode where they got terribly drunk and had to stop filming and come back a few days later.

bluetidepro 7y ago

Is there an easy way to download results from that vault in mass (not having to click into each item)? Or is that not available? EDIT: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/archive-downloader/elhoagejfapekjaefenmngphliikoace https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/archive-downloader... - It looks like that's a solid option to use a Chrome extension for it.

humaniania 7y ago
For random Chrome extensions, I use a sandbox session (windows 10 feature), just in case.
rsync 7y ago
"Is there an easy way to download results from that vault in mass ..." This is neither a rebuke nor pedantry - I genuinely hope this will be useful to you: It's "en masse".

josteink 7y ago

The amount of RedLetterMedia comments in this thread is seriously telling about the correlation between hackers and b-movie fans. And oh yeah. Guilty myself.

ggffryuuj 7y ago

My step mom was recently going through a bunch of old vhs tapes looking for wedding footage of her mother’s wedding. 99% of the tapes are television from the early 2000s. She was going to just throw them away! So now I’ve got 30 tapes of early 2000s gold. I’m going to digitize them and upload them to YouTube.

jcomis 7y ago

I love stuff like this. Here's one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/user/5ninthavenueproject https://www.youtube.com/user/5ninthavenueproject

themodelplumber 7y ago
You reminded me of this spy film, which starts with a shot of a VHS recorder! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqFYFT1nqp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqFYFT1nqp8

andrewstuart 7y ago

There would be all sorts of weird stuff on them. Young people probably would not know that watching VHS tapes anything could happen because they got reused. So you'd be watching a movie and halfway through it would suddenly switch over to a shuttle launch or a music video or a documentary or something cause someone decided to record something else at that point. I once recorded a three hour British detective show. I watched it for three hours and it got to the final scene to reveal whodunnit and the tape ran out. It's great that they are archiving the old content but I don't miss VHS in the least.

themodelplumber 7y ago
> I watched it for three hours and it got to the final scene to reveal whodunnit and the tape ran out. I ran into one of these on Youtube just a couple of weeks ago. The reaction in the comments was something less than amused. (Bittersweet memories of taping over some of Mom's seemingly non-important video in order to record...what was it, the first X-files episode? A _Wings_ episode about a favorite jet? Something like that. But man, she was not happy.)
- GuardianCaveman 7y ago
  You’re the first person in any forum online I’ve seen reference Wings. My dads friend used to call my dad to tell him it was on and he’d switch from whatever ninja turtles / golden girls / simpsons episode we were watching. We despised wings! But actually it’s a great show.
  - themodelplumber 7y ago
    Funny. I hadn't searched for it online much but I can understand its lack of traction. It was like a lot of commercial promotional clips spliced together, in some ways. It left a lot of questions unanswered, too! But it was great for an overview and the theme music will be forever engraved in my memory, right next to the _Strike Commander_ theme. :-)
isbjorn16 7y ago

ris 7y ago

Related: rescuing historic teletext pages from VHS recordings of broadcast TV: https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext

jamiek88 7y ago
WOW! What a brilliant idea! So obvious now, the teletext data must have been embedded into the tv picture thus captured by VHS recording. This got me very excited, I'd love to rebuild the old Ceefax 101 pages.
- ris 7y ago
  Search ebay for "used vhs" and start shopping.
- kaetemi 7y ago
  I remember trying out teletext from a VHS whe I was a kid. Was interesting that it worked. Lots of glitches in the data, though.

Zenst 7y ago

With the number of people chastised in later life for old tweets, this could be interesting. However, it's such recordings that have saved many an old TV show as the studios reused tapes as well. Kinda how few Doctor Who episodes got saved.

subdane 7y ago

There's a great doc that came out last year on Marion Stokes, who recorded decades of television. Her footage is being added to The Internet Archive https://blog.archive.org/tag/marion-stokes/ https://blog.archive.org/tag/marion-stokes/

WalterBright 7y ago

My father left me several hundred 6 hour VHS tapes. I had no idea what was on them because he'd kept an index, but it was mostly missing. There was a lot of interesting random stuff on them, mostly from the 80's. The bits of stuff he recorded is like a peek inside his brain :-)

dmix 7y ago

This would be great audio/visual sampling content for musicians and the like.

WalterBright 7y ago

Oh darn. Still no "Dance Fever" episodes from the early 80's. There are a handful on youtube, but not the interesting ones.

mml 7y ago

The "removed a rib" thing was started by Gabriele D’Annunzio, father of Italian fascism. Most likely untrue, but a rumor also most likely to be spread by its subject. Check out https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/behind-the-bastards/e/66732817?autoplay=true https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/behind-the-bastards/e/66732... for the details behind this truly unlikely person.

olivermarks 7y ago

What is the copyright situation with these tapes? I get the value of archiving and preserving digitally but if I'd invested time and money creating a vhs catalog of titles I'd be unhappy to see them suddenly all over youtube (assuming they had some appeal of course) with no ability to profit from them.

themodelplumber 7y ago
Good question. At least on the surface it seems only fair that at some point, after the archivist has performed a reasonably thorough search for copyright maintenance, the burden of justification then switches over to the (latest?) copyright claimant. "Yes, we have the internet now. Yes, if you intend to enforce your copyright, your claim should be searchable via the internet. Either way you may still have to reach out and publish notice of your claim." That kind of thing. Kind of like Gutenberg.org texts, with their disclaimer that "we checked and couldn't find any renewal of copyright," or whatever it says nowadays...
epanchin 7y ago
Don't you think 20 years is enough time to profit from a creation? Copywrite law lasts so long, it makes little sense.
- olivermarks 7y ago
  It's a tricky one. If I flew around the world with expensive camera gear and edited up some kind of big budget travel video I'd be a lot more upset about seeing it free than if I had made a 'origami how to' video in 1989 that was very low budget...
monocasa 7y ago
Archive.org is a library in the state of California, and legally has a little carte blanche when it comes to copyright.
incompatible 7y ago
Presumably they are all copyrighted, and presumably IA will take them down if it gets a DMCA notification. Perhaps they could then use a library workaround and make them available to one person at a time, or whatever.

cabaalis 7y ago

Three (edit:Two) full seasons of Salute Your Shorts makes this very much worth it.

LocalH 7y ago

I hope they’re capturing this at full resolution and preserving the full 60i signal. Too many times, people think VHS is 320x240 and capture accordingly, dropping half the temporal resolution from the get go. Even though there’s not a ton of horizontal evolution, a full D1 resolution capture will represent the tape much better than a half-resolution capture (but half-D1 would still be better than 320 or 352 by 240).