3 ms·

> It is a '70s 1200ft 3M tape, likely 9 track, which has a pretty good chance of being recoverable. Not old enough to have this kind of knowledge or confidence

> It is a '70s 1200ft 3M tape, likely 9 track, which has a pretty good chance of being recoverable. Not old enough to have this kind of knowledge or confidence. I wonder if instead one day I'll be helping some future generation read old floppies, CDs, and IDE/ATA disks *slaps top of AT tower*.

retrac 1y ago
You might be able to use that old floppy drive. But you won't be able to use that old Pentium machine the drive is in. Because you will need several hundred gigabytes of RAM and a very fast IO bus. The gold standard today for archiving magnetic media is to make a flux image. The media is treated as if it were an analog recording and sampled at such a high rate that the smallest details are captured. Interpretation is done later, in software. The only antique electronics involved are often the tape or drive head, directly connected to a high speed digitizer. And indeed that appears to be the plan Al Kossow has for the tape: https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-November/032765.html https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-November/032765.htm... As for CDs, I don't see the rush; the ones that were properly made will likely outlast human civilization.
- fsckboy 1y ago
  >As for CDs, I don't see the rush; the ones that were properly made will likely outlast human civilization. recordable CD-Rs or DVD-Rs do not last close to that long, and those are the ones that hold the only copies of certain bits (original versions of software, etc) that people are most interested in not losing. manufactured CDs and DVDs hold commericial music and films that are for the most part not rare at all.
  - accrual 1y ago
    Yes, good distinction. Recordable media will most likely contain data an individual intended to save. But because it's recordable, the dyes and structures on the disc aren't as stable. Long-lasting, good quality mastered optical media is probably mass produced and has many copies, including a distinct and potentially well-preserved source. It's probably fair to say that a lot of mixtapes (mix CDs?) from the early 2000s are lost to dye issues...
    - quantummagic 1y ago
      > lost to dye issues... Not that it helps to recover older data, but things are better with Blu-ray today; at least if you buy decent quality discs. Advertised lifespans are multiple decades, up to 100 years, or even 500 years for "M" discs. And in the "M" disc case, it's achieved by using a non-organic dye, to avoid the degradation issues.
    - themafia 1y ago
      > structures on the disc aren't as stable. Which is why the format has generous error correction built in.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- squarefoot 1y ago
  > As for CDs, I don't see the rush; the ones that were properly made will likely outlast human civilization. Printed ones will last a lot more, but writable ones will degrade to unreadable state in a few years. I lost countless of them years ago, including the double backup of a project I worked on. Branded disks written and verified, properly stored, no sunlight, no objects or anything above them, no moisture or whatever. All gone just because of time. As I read other horror stories like mine, I just stopped using them altogether and never looked back.
  - Zardoz84 1y ago
    Don't forget about the mold that eats cd and dvds for breakfast. I saw a few dvds damaged by it
- padjo 1y ago
  It’s so obvious in retrospect but I never considered they would do this! Thanks for sharing.
- easyThrowaway 1y ago
  'that were properly made' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I've got a bunch of Sega Saturn and AKAI/Zero-G sample cds that are basically unreadable already due to disc rot. There was a lot of cheaply made optical media floating around in the late '90s.
  - noir_lord 1y ago
    and anything you "burnt" yourself has an even shorter life. In many ways our storage media has become more ephemeral as capacities have increased - except LTO at least which seems to keep up with storage demands/price and durability, LTO is eternal (or long enough to be able to move it from LTO-(N-4) to LTO-N at least).
  - WorldMaker 1y ago
    Also we've started seeing some of the first wave of "properly made" CDs from the 1970s/1980s degrade. 45-50 years is a good, long run, but it is certainly not "forever".
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
codezero 1y ago
Just anecdata, but I had this concern when I worked in academia and we backed up all our data to writable DVDs. I was there 10 years after the start of the project and I periodically checked the old DVDs to make sure they weren't corrupted. After 10 years, which was longer than the assumed shelf life of writable/rewritable DVDs at the time, I never found a single corrupt file on the disks. They were stored in ideal conditions though, in a case, in a closed climate controlled shelf, and rarely if ever removed or used. Also, just because I think it's funny, the archive was over 4000 DVDs. (We had a redundant copies of the data compressed and uncompressed, I think it was like 3000 uncompressed 1k compressed) there was also an offsite redundant copy we put on portable IDE (and eventually SATA) drives.
- accrual 1y ago
  Cool tale! I have observed a mix of viable and unreadable user-burned CD media from the late 90s and early 2000s. It definitely depends on the quality of the media, quality of the burn/drive/laser, and how well it was stored interim. My oldest disc is some bright blue Verbatim disk my childhood friend made for me so I could play our favorite game at home pre-2000. I have a bit-perfect copy, but the actual disc still reads fine in 2025 when I last tested it.
  - codezero 1y ago
    Yep, quality is definitely a factor here, as much as it can be. We had NSF funding pre-2008, so there was plenty of budget for quality media. We spared no expense, and while I stayed in a $60/night hostel in SF for conferences, our rewritable DVDs were the best money could buy at the time lol.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  Thank your procurement agent and hvac guy. My team used to maintain go-kits for continuity of operations for a government org. We ran into a few scenarios where the dye on optical media would just go, and another where replacement foam for the pelican cases off gassed and reacted with the media!
  - 1y ago
satiated_grue 1y ago
Take a look at floppy disk controllers like the AppleSauce, Greaseweazle, and Kryoflux for preserving floppies by recording at the flux-transition level.

retrac 1y ago

You might be able to use that old floppy drive. But you won't be able to use that old Pentium machine the drive is in. Because you will need several hundred gigabytes of RAM and a very fast IO bus. The gold standard today for archiving magnetic media is to make a flux image. The media is treated as if it were an analog recording and sampled at such a high rate that the smallest details are captured. Interpretation is done later, in software. The only antique electronics involved are often the tape or drive head, directly connected to a high speed digitizer. And indeed that appears to be the plan Al Kossow has for the tape: https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-November/032765.html https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-November/032765.htm... As for CDs, I don't see the rush; the ones that were properly made will likely outlast human civilization.

fsckboy 1y ago
>As for CDs, I don't see the rush; the ones that were properly made will likely outlast human civilization. recordable CD-Rs or DVD-Rs do not last close to that long, and those are the ones that hold the only copies of certain bits (original versions of software, etc) that people are most interested in not losing. manufactured CDs and DVDs hold commericial music and films that are for the most part not rare at all.
- accrual 1y ago
  Yes, good distinction. Recordable media will most likely contain data an individual intended to save. But because it's recordable, the dyes and structures on the disc aren't as stable. Long-lasting, good quality mastered optical media is probably mass produced and has many copies, including a distinct and potentially well-preserved source. It's probably fair to say that a lot of mixtapes (mix CDs?) from the early 2000s are lost to dye issues...
  - quantummagic 1y ago
    > lost to dye issues... Not that it helps to recover older data, but things are better with Blu-ray today; at least if you buy decent quality discs. Advertised lifespans are multiple decades, up to 100 years, or even 500 years for "M" discs. And in the "M" disc case, it's achieved by using a non-organic dye, to avoid the degradation issues.
  - themafia 1y ago
    > structures on the disc aren't as stable. Which is why the format has generous error correction built in.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
squarefoot 1y ago
> As for CDs, I don't see the rush; the ones that were properly made will likely outlast human civilization. Printed ones will last a lot more, but writable ones will degrade to unreadable state in a few years. I lost countless of them years ago, including the double backup of a project I worked on. Branded disks written and verified, properly stored, no sunlight, no objects or anything above them, no moisture or whatever. All gone just because of time. As I read other horror stories like mine, I just stopped using them altogether and never looked back.
- Zardoz84 1y ago
  Don't forget about the mold that eats cd and dvds for breakfast. I saw a few dvds damaged by it
padjo 1y ago
It’s so obvious in retrospect but I never considered they would do this! Thanks for sharing.
easyThrowaway 1y ago
'that were properly made' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I've got a bunch of Sega Saturn and AKAI/Zero-G sample cds that are basically unreadable already due to disc rot. There was a lot of cheaply made optical media floating around in the late '90s.
- noir_lord 1y ago
  and anything you "burnt" yourself has an even shorter life. In many ways our storage media has become more ephemeral as capacities have increased - except LTO at least which seems to keep up with storage demands/price and durability, LTO is eternal (or long enough to be able to move it from LTO-(N-4) to LTO-N at least).
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  Also we've started seeing some of the first wave of "properly made" CDs from the 1970s/1980s degrade. 45-50 years is a good, long run, but it is certainly not "forever".

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

codezero 1y ago

Just anecdata, but I had this concern when I worked in academia and we backed up all our data to writable DVDs. I was there 10 years after the start of the project and I periodically checked the old DVDs to make sure they weren't corrupted. After 10 years, which was longer than the assumed shelf life of writable/rewritable DVDs at the time, I never found a single corrupt file on the disks. They were stored in ideal conditions though, in a case, in a closed climate controlled shelf, and rarely if ever removed or used. Also, just because I think it's funny, the archive was over 4000 DVDs. (We had a redundant copies of the data compressed and uncompressed, I think it was like 3000 uncompressed 1k compressed) there was also an offsite redundant copy we put on portable IDE (and eventually SATA) drives.

accrual 1y ago
Cool tale! I have observed a mix of viable and unreadable user-burned CD media from the late 90s and early 2000s. It definitely depends on the quality of the media, quality of the burn/drive/laser, and how well it was stored interim. My oldest disc is some bright blue Verbatim disk my childhood friend made for me so I could play our favorite game at home pre-2000. I have a bit-perfect copy, but the actual disc still reads fine in 2025 when I last tested it.
- codezero 1y ago
  Yep, quality is definitely a factor here, as much as it can be. We had NSF funding pre-2008, so there was plenty of budget for quality media. We spared no expense, and while I stayed in a $60/night hostel in SF for conferences, our rewritable DVDs were the best money could buy at the time lol.
Spooky23 1y ago
Thank your procurement agent and hvac guy. My team used to maintain go-kits for continuity of operations for a government org. We ran into a few scenarios where the dye on optical media would just go, and another where replacement foam for the pelican cases off gassed and reacted with the media!
- 1y ago

satiated_grue 1y ago

Take a look at floppy disk controllers like the AppleSauce, Greaseweazle, and Kryoflux for preserving floppies by recording at the flux-transition level.