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What's the scenario where you cannot take the old 1990's hard drive and back up its data in multiple cloud service providers cold storage (Azure/AWS/GCP) and ha

What's the scenario where you cannot take the old 1990's hard drive and back up its data in multiple cloud service providers cold storage (Azure/AWS/GCP) and have to keep the obsolete physical media on hand? I'm struggling to understand why these miles of shelves filled with essentially hardware junk haven't been digitized at the time when this media worked and didn't experience read issues. The article doesn't really provide an explanation for this other than incompetence and the business biting off more than it can reasonably chew. I'd be furious if I paid for a service that promised to archive my data, and 10-15 years later told me 25% of it was unreadable. I mean it's not like it was a surprise either. These workflows became digital 2-3 decades ago. There was plenty of time to prepare and convert this. That's kind of what I'm paying you for. As always, seems like the simple folk of /r/datahoarder and other archivist communities are more competent than a legacy industry behemoth.

akira2501 2y ago
> the business biting off more than it can reasonably chew It's hoarding behavior. They paid "a lot" of money for it, have no idea how to further exploit it, but can't shake the feeling that it might be massively valuable one day. The only difference is they pay someone to hold their hoard for them.
- eitally 2y ago
  Alternatively ... they are forced to maintain it for compliance reasons, especially when it comes to healthcare, finance and other regulated industries (defense, in particular). This even applies to manufacturing companies assembly medical devices and defense products: all the data about the supply chain, the engineering designs & changes, the manufacturing and quality testing, and shipment needs to be kept for XX years and is subject to both audit by regulatory agencies and to legal discovery.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    Those are all things which can be printed out and stored in alternative forms and possibly even recreated from other data. It's also the case that much of that data will never be permanently at rest and so several archive copies of the data exist. Recordings of performances are an entirely different category of artefact.
surgical_fire 2y ago
I mean, even if by contract they were supposed to store physical media with the backups, it is still horrible incompetence to not have the same data backed up twice, and from time to time test the disks for failure to rebuild the backup from one of the copies. It would be extremely unlikely for both disks to fail together. What I'm describing is the bare minimum. This is their job, by all accounts. Amazing.
0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
It depends on what specifically Iron Mountain is selling you. A place to store your physical data device or are they promising to keep your data available? The former sounds cheaper and easier for Iron Mountain. Given Iron Mountain started in the 1950s, redundantly backing up customer data was infeasibly expensive for most of the company’s lifetime.
Cheer2171 2y ago
> I'd be furious if I paid for a service that promised to archive my data, and 10-15 years later told me 25% of it was unreadable. The article is very vague on this, but I thought this company was first doing something like a bank safety deposit box. Send us your media in whatever format and we will keep it secure in a climate controlled vault. They don't offer to archive your data, they offer to store your media. Now it seems they pivoted to archiving data. This is an ad for their existing media storage clients to buy their data archive service: > Iron Mountain would like to alert the music industry at large to the fact that, even though you may have followed recommended best practices at the time, those archived drives may now be no more easily playable than a 40-year-old reel of Ampex 456 tape.
- eitally 2y ago
  They did make this pivot several years ago, with big upsell and a huge internal product advancement to offer housebuilt eDiscovery for lots of data types. I was at Google Cloud when they did the first big deal around this a few years ago: https://www.ironmountain.com/resources/blogs-and-articles/f/from-tape-to-cloud-to-gen-ai https://www.ironmountain.com/resources/blogs-and-articles/f/...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
tecleandor 2y ago
Also where you don't render the tracks pre and post processing and leave them aside to the ProTools project files. I don't know who expects to open a ProTools project with a bunch of unknown plugins after some years have passed...
- andrewf 2y ago
  Back in the 2000s the Australian government provided software that ran on Windows to prepare and submit your personal tax return. I used to archive my tax return by preparing it in a Windows VM, then storing the whole VM image.
  - tecleandor 2y ago
    Spanish tax filing software was terrible back in the day. The good part is you would just print it to paper or PDF and archive that :D
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bob1029 2y ago
Iron mountain also provides services like source code escrow. With 2 parties involved in the data, you may want to impose additional restrictions regarding how and when it can be replicated. The party requesting escrow clearly has interest in the source being as durable as possible, but the party providing the source may not want it to be made available across an array of dropbox-style online/networked systems just to accommodate an unlikely black swan event. A compromise could be to require that the source reside on the original backup media with multiple copies and media types available.
- spydum 2y ago
  Not for a little while now. The escrow business was sold to NCC: https://www.nccgroup.com/us/newsroom/ncc-group-launches-escode/ https://www.nccgroup.com/us/newsroom/ncc-group-launches-esco...
kmeisthax 2y ago
It's not a matter of incompetence, it's a matter of being very, very cheap. Artistic endeavors are a unique blend of "extremely chaotic workflows nobody bothers to remember the moment the work is 'done'", "90% of our output doesn't recoup costs so we don't want to burn cash on data storage", and "that one thing you made 20 years ago is now an indie darling and we want to remaster it". A lot of creatives and publishers were sold on the promise of digital 30-odd years ago. They recorded their masters - their "source code" - onto formats they believed would be still in use today. Then they paid Iron Mountain to store that media. Iron Mountain is a safe deposit box on steroids, they use underground vaults to store physical media. You store media in Iron Mountain if you want that specific media to remain safe in any circumstance[0], but that's a strategy that doesn't make sense for electronic media. There is no electronic format that is shelf-stable and guaranteed to be economically readable 30 years out. What you already know works is periodic remigration and verification[1], but that's an active measure that costs money to do. Publishers don't want to pay that cost, it breaks their business model, 90% of what they make will never be profitable. So now they're paying Iron Mountain even more for data recovery on the small fraction of data they care about. The key thing to remember is that they don't know what they need to recover at the time the data is being stored. If they did, publishers wouldn't be spending money on risky projects, they'd have a scientific formula to create a perfect movie or album or TV show that would recoup costs all the time. [0] The original sales pitch being that these vaults were nuke-proof. [1] Your cloud provider does this automatically and that's built into the monthly fees you would pay. People who are DIYing their storage setup and using BTRFS or ZFS are using filesystems that automate that for online disks, but you still pay for keeping the disks online.

akira2501 2y ago

> the business biting off more than it can reasonably chew It's hoarding behavior. They paid "a lot" of money for it, have no idea how to further exploit it, but can't shake the feeling that it might be massively valuable one day. The only difference is they pay someone to hold their hoard for them.

eitally 2y ago
Alternatively ... they are forced to maintain it for compliance reasons, especially when it comes to healthcare, finance and other regulated industries (defense, in particular). This even applies to manufacturing companies assembly medical devices and defense products: all the data about the supply chain, the engineering designs & changes, the manufacturing and quality testing, and shipment needs to be kept for XX years and is subject to both audit by regulatory agencies and to legal discovery.
- akira2501 2y ago
  Those are all things which can be printed out and stored in alternative forms and possibly even recreated from other data. It's also the case that much of that data will never be permanently at rest and so several archive copies of the data exist. Recordings of performances are an entirely different category of artefact.

surgical_fire 2y ago

I mean, even if by contract they were supposed to store physical media with the backups, it is still horrible incompetence to not have the same data backed up twice, and from time to time test the disks for failure to rebuild the backup from one of the copies. It would be extremely unlikely for both disks to fail together. What I'm describing is the bare minimum. This is their job, by all accounts. Amazing.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago

It depends on what specifically Iron Mountain is selling you. A place to store your physical data device or are they promising to keep your data available? The former sounds cheaper and easier for Iron Mountain. Given Iron Mountain started in the 1950s, redundantly backing up customer data was infeasibly expensive for most of the company’s lifetime.

Cheer2171 2y ago

> I'd be furious if I paid for a service that promised to archive my data, and 10-15 years later told me 25% of it was unreadable. The article is very vague on this, but I thought this company was first doing something like a bank safety deposit box. Send us your media in whatever format and we will keep it secure in a climate controlled vault. They don't offer to archive your data, they offer to store your media. Now it seems they pivoted to archiving data. This is an ad for their existing media storage clients to buy their data archive service: > Iron Mountain would like to alert the music industry at large to the fact that, even though you may have followed recommended best practices at the time, those archived drives may now be no more easily playable than a 40-year-old reel of Ampex 456 tape.

eitally 2y ago
They did make this pivot several years ago, with big upsell and a huge internal product advancement to offer housebuilt eDiscovery for lots of data types. I was at Google Cloud when they did the first big deal around this a few years ago: https://www.ironmountain.com/resources/blogs-and-articles/f/from-tape-to-cloud-to-gen-ai https://www.ironmountain.com/resources/blogs-and-articles/f/...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

tecleandor 2y ago

Also where you don't render the tracks pre and post processing and leave them aside to the ProTools project files. I don't know who expects to open a ProTools project with a bunch of unknown plugins after some years have passed...

andrewf 2y ago
Back in the 2000s the Australian government provided software that ran on Windows to prepare and submit your personal tax return. I used to archive my tax return by preparing it in a Windows VM, then storing the whole VM image.
- tecleandor 2y ago
  Spanish tax filing software was terrible back in the day. The good part is you would just print it to paper or PDF and archive that :D

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bob1029 2y ago

Iron mountain also provides services like source code escrow. With 2 parties involved in the data, you may want to impose additional restrictions regarding how and when it can be replicated. The party requesting escrow clearly has interest in the source being as durable as possible, but the party providing the source may not want it to be made available across an array of dropbox-style online/networked systems just to accommodate an unlikely black swan event. A compromise could be to require that the source reside on the original backup media with multiple copies and media types available.

spydum 2y ago
Not for a little while now. The escrow business was sold to NCC: https://www.nccgroup.com/us/newsroom/ncc-group-launches-escode/ https://www.nccgroup.com/us/newsroom/ncc-group-launches-esco...

kmeisthax 2y ago

It's not a matter of incompetence, it's a matter of being very, very cheap. Artistic endeavors are a unique blend of "extremely chaotic workflows nobody bothers to remember the moment the work is 'done'", "90% of our output doesn't recoup costs so we don't want to burn cash on data storage", and "that one thing you made 20 years ago is now an indie darling and we want to remaster it". A lot of creatives and publishers were sold on the promise of digital 30-odd years ago. They recorded their masters - their "source code" - onto formats they believed would be still in use today. Then they paid Iron Mountain to store that media. Iron Mountain is a safe deposit box on steroids, they use underground vaults to store physical media. You store media in Iron Mountain if you want that specific media to remain safe in any circumstance[0], but that's a strategy that doesn't make sense for electronic media. There is no electronic format that is shelf-stable and guaranteed to be economically readable 30 years out. What you already know works is periodic remigration and verification[1], but that's an active measure that costs money to do. Publishers don't want to pay that cost, it breaks their business model, 90% of what they make will never be profitable. So now they're paying Iron Mountain even more for data recovery on the small fraction of data they care about. The key thing to remember is that they don't know what they need to recover at the time the data is being stored. If they did, publishers wouldn't be spending money on risky projects, they'd have a scientific formula to create a perfect movie or album or TV show that would recoup costs all the time. [0] The original sales pitch being that these vaults were nuke-proof. [1] Your cloud provider does this automatically and that's built into the monthly fees you would pay. People who are DIYing their storage setup and using BTRFS or ZFS are using filesystems that automate that for online disks, but you still pay for keeping the disks online.