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Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

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Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#12
My step mom was recently going through a bunch of old vhs tapes looking for wedding footage of her mother’s wedding. 99% of the tapes are television from the early 2000s. She was going to just throw them away! So now I’ve got 30 tapes of early 2000s gold. I’m going to digitize them and upload them to YouTube.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#13

How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From what little I've read, all of the media accessable to the layman has an archive lifetime of less than 30 years before physical degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever. That makes for a brittle civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge is stored on media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity.

I have 30 year old CDs that play as good as the first time, as well as older vinyl discs.

I'm sure I own 20 year old DVDs in same condition.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#14

How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From what little I've read, all of the media accessable to the layman has an archive lifetime of less than 30 years before physical degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever. That makes for a brittle civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge is stored on media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity.

After going down this rabbit hole, I concluded that M-Disc is the right trade off at the moment. They’re not too expensive, the writers are available, they’ll last, and they could be reverse engineered if discovered in the future.

The second choice is using hard drives (easily available) and every so often power them up and copy data to new drives.

If you have a small quantity of data, then encode and laser print onto paper, with a font designed for optical scanning or QR code’s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#15
post #14

How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From what little I've read, all of the media accessable to the layman has an archive lifetime of less than 30 years before physical degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever. That makes for a brittle civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge is stored on media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity.

After going down this rabbit hole, I concluded that M-Disc is the right trade off at the moment. They’re not too expensive, the writers are available, they’ll last, and they could be reverse engineered if discovered in the future. The second choice is using hard drives (easily available) and every so often power them up and copy data to new drives. If you have a small quantity of data, then encode and laser print ont…

Seems hard to get hold of M-DISCs now.

Are they still produced?

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#16

How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From what little I've read, all of the media accessable to the layman has an archive lifetime of less than 30 years before physical degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever. That makes for a brittle civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge is stored on media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity.

I have 30 year old CDs that play as good as the first time, as well as older vinyl discs. I'm sure I own 20 year old DVDs in same condition.

same, but I've also seen some cheaper makes of CDRs break down after 20 years and the storage layer crack etc.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#17

Is there an easy way to download results from that vault in mass (not having to click into each item)? Or is that not available? EDIT: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/archive-downloader... - It looks like that's a solid option to use a Chrome extension for it.

For random Chrome extensions, I use a sandbox session (windows 10 feature), just in case.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#18

I'm almost afraid to write this as I fear it will be removed soon and am surprised it hasn't been already but this was the first thing I looked for... https://archive.org/details/star-wars-ONTV-Early-80s/Star+Wa...

To hell with that ugliness, go all-out and look for a torrent of Star Wars Despecialized Editions. As good as you can get the originals, these days.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#19

How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From what little I've read, all of the media accessable to the layman has an archive lifetime of less than 30 years before physical degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever. That makes for a brittle civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge is stored on media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity.

Do what archivists do - copy.

The challenge is keeping things accessible. Only copying does that for electronic media. That includes getting things like photos printed.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#20
post #15
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After going down this rabbit hole, I concluded that M-Disc is the right trade off at the moment. They’re not too expensive, the writers are available, they’ll last, and they could be reverse engineered if discovered in the future. The second choice is using hard drives (easily available) and every so often power them up and copy data to new drives. If you have a small quantity of data, then encode and laser print ont…

Seems hard to get hold of M-DISCs now. Are they still produced?

I see many listings for them on US Amazon.
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