The music industry traded tape for hard drives and got a hard-earned lesson.

My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.

  • @[email protected]English
    15•2 months ago

    Tape is cheap and durable if you store it properly. Except the tape drive is expensive af.

    Microsoft is working on glass storage. A glass plate can last 10,000 years according to Microsoft. Hopefully that tech will get miniaturized and available to consumers within our lifetimes.

    • Flying SquidEnglish
      8•2 months ago

      As a former audio engineer in the days where we still used it- tape can rot.

        • Flying SquidEnglish
          6•2 months ago

          It seemed like the person I was talking to didn’t. The implication was that tape was viable as long-term storage. It isn’t. I’ve seen tapes rot after a year. DATs were especially prone to that, but even things like 2" multitrack audio tape can go bad that quickly.