Twenty percent of hard drives used for long-term music storage in the 90s have failed

About a fifth of the hard drives it receives from the media industry for service are completely dead, said enterprise information management company Iron Mountain, which specializes in records management, information destruction, data backup, and data recovery. This means information contained within those drives — including studio masters, live sessions, and everything in between — could be lost forever unless the recording label has backed up the missing data in another storage drive or medium.

“It’s so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there,” Robert Koszela, the Global Director for Strategic Initiatives & Growth for Iron Mountain Media & Archive Services, told Mix . “Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything’s in order. And both of them are bricks.”

The migration to hard drives from tape storage began in earnest in the 2000s with the arrival of 5.1 Surround Sound and Guitar Hero. These technologies required labels to remaster their tracks, and they discovered that some of the tape they used to store the original recordings had started to deteriorate, with some already unplayable. They also had some tape records that still looked good, but they no longer have any compatible hardware to play them. Because of this, Mix says the music industry has focused on moving its tape archives to digital media like hard drives.

However, just like tape, hard drives also deteriorate — with most commercial drives rated to last for only three to five years. Even if you store them in the most optimum condition, you’ll find that even drives designed for archival storage will eventually die. Unfortunately, most often, the only time that a studio will open its archives is if it needs to look for original masters for commercial use. If it has waited too long, then it might be too late to recover the drive that it needs, resulting in the loss of all the information contained within.

Thankfully, researchers have continually been working on many different archival storage media that are more reliable than hard drives and even solid-state drives (which only have a limited number of reads and writes). We’ve even seen a startup working on archival glass storage that it claims could last 5,000 years. However, until the arrival of these media at affordable prices, the only thing that we can do to ensure the integrity of our data archives is to completely rewrite them to newer media with backups every three to five years.