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[donnie7]

What are the best ways to archive current 2 mixes and digital multitrack sessions? Something that will last. Be able to use it in 10, 25, 50 years. What media and formats would you suggest?

[Ralf Kleemann]

With the current situation, you are looking at copying your data from an obsolete media to a more recent one every five to ten years. This situation is unlikely to change any time soon. The important stuff you may wish to have on more than one media type, anyway...
The safest bet if you can spend the extra buck is, to my knowledge, DVD-RAM, which has excellent durability and an effective built-in error correction scheme. The disavantage is that you need a separate drive (or better, two), and due to the error correction and write-verification, it's a little slow.
Other DVD-/+R media are cheaper, but a little more prone to data corruption. CD-R has an inferior error correction scheme, but is definitely a cheap solution. Not very handy if you have a lot of data to back up, though.
Hard disks, or any other magnetic media such as tapes, have the disadvantage that the magnetic charge fades over time. For hard disks, this might very well be 10 years or more, but I think you are better off with optical media, which do not show this problem at all.
Another problem is physical storage - I'm not even daring to offer a viable solution there!!

Hope this will kick it off

Ralf

[bobkatz]

Ralf Kleemann wrote on Tue, 28 September 2004 08:04

With the current situation, you are looking at copying your data from an obsolete media to a more recent one every five to ten years. This situation is unlikely to change any time soon.

Plan on it! Obsolescence of format will never go away. This is the computer industry, after all.  "Migration to a new format" is even part of the plan of large music firms that must archive their material.  What will start happening is improved automated systems that "automatically" permit upgrading to the new format.

Five years ago at an AES convention, Sony presented their archiving system which consisted of tons of Exabyte machines with autoloaders attached. Migration to a new tape was part of the planning. What did they do when Exabyte as a format became obsolete shortly thereafter?  Imagine the hidden costs of all this digital technology just for the purpose of "upward" migration.

Clearly if you want only 25-30 year life, then analog tape is viable (and most desirable). But Steve Albini will admit that only the first generation analog is viable and all subsequent copies go downhill VERY fast. I've played 40-50 year old tapes, and some of them sound remarkable, but not all. Every time the tape is played it goes downhill a hair, in fact.