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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

#111

Post by ta999999171 »

slim wrote: post #109
allovernow wrote: post #3

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've always wondered what makes micro SD cards not suitable for long term storage. What makes them decay

They store things the same way SSDs, do, with electrical charge.

It weakens. That's a shit explanation, I'd definitely look up "how does flash storage degrade".

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

#112

Post by lm28469 »

einpoklum wrote: post #66
WalterBright wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do what I do - copy it forward every couple years onto new media. My oldest files are from 1977 - proof: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10 My files have gone from magtape to 8" floppy to various 5.25" floppy to 3.5 floppy to zip drives to cdroms to dvdroms, then to hard disks of ever-increasing size. (My old hard drives are completely unreadable now.) I'm sorry I never kept my punch card decks. I'm sur…

But - and sorry for the morbid question - what about when you grow older, and may not be able to take care of that? Or when you pass away?

You have to come to term with the fact that 99.99% of (your/all) medias are useless in the grand scheme of things.

Imagine having to take care of the backup of your ancestors data on 10 generations, that'd be ridiculous.

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

#113

Post by dsego »

rasz wrote: post #89
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW. CD-ROM has stronger FEC than CD-DA. It still won't protect you from bit rot, particularly on writable media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM#CD-ROM_format

CDROM bit rot is mostly the paint flaking off, but the real data is stored in the plastic. DVD should be even harder to bitrot because data is entirely inside the plastic. Burned disks are another story.

You must be joking. Try to scrape off the paint and keep the plastic, see if it works.

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

#114

Post by glouwbug »

einpoklum wrote: post #66
WalterBright wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do what I do - copy it forward every couple years onto new media. My oldest files are from 1977 - proof: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10 My files have gone from magtape to 8" floppy to various 5.25" floppy to 3.5 floppy to zip drives to cdroms to dvdroms, then to hard disks of ever-increasing size. (My old hard drives are completely unreadable now.) I'm sorry I never kept my punch card decks. I'm sur…

But - and sorry for the morbid question - what about when you grow older, and may not be able to take care of that? Or when you pass away?

Very little has survived on paper considering how many people have lived in the past.

It's just life. A lot of what may seem important with our backups really isn't. Whatever we have produced today will return to the earth, and will be reinvented by generations in the future.

It's their lives to live, not ours.

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

#115

Post by CaptArmchair »

codetrotter wrote: post #55
CaptArmchair wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LOCKSS project is an approach used in university networks around the world to preserve research data for the long term. https://www.lockss.org/ The big issue isn't the technology, it's the vast amounts of data that are being created at this point. Storage is cheap, but the labor that goes into managing the longevity of datasets isn't: it's essentially continually keeping your infrastructure up-to-date whilst also…

> The downside of that is that your ability to find a specific picture from 5 years ago is entirely restricted to the extent that you were able to organize and add specific metadata to that picture. I disagree with the premise that we should spend time manually organizing and tagging our pictures all that much. The metadata that the phone adds to pictures – time stamp and GPS coordinates – is already sufficient in a…

I would like to agree with you. However, your vision hinges on this massive invisible infrastructure which is the cloud.

Your phone didn't recognize the object, you relied on a cloud service to do that for you.

When you use such services for free, you'll end up with all kinds of legal compromises that don't necessarily benefit you as an individual in the long run. Your personal convenience is subservient to other goals that don't necessarily align with public interests at large.

You could argue that the infrastructure will keep miniaturizing and one day you might not need those services. But that's not how things are currently evolving. Moreover, it will always take massive amounts of data to re-create the same models that are able to recognize patterns that are relevant to your specific context when you have a query.

At the end of the day, it's about what trade offs you are willing to accept. Cloud services based on machine learning do give you a good amount of convenience, but then you have to be willing to accept the hidden costs as well.

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

#116

Post by chantelles »

andrewstuart wrote: post #41

There would be all sorts of weird stuff on them. Young people probably would not know that watching VHS tapes anything could happen because they got reused. So you'd be watching a movie and halfway through it would suddenly switch over to a shuttle launch or a music video or a documentary or something cause someone decided to record something else at that point. I once recorded a three hour British detective show. I…

Why I miss that aspect of VHS: In '95 I took a VHS tape that was in a pile in a shared apartment with no label and recorded my friend joking about her bakery job and then she popped the tape in and we watched it and every time I paused the tape a few seconds of the porn underneath it showed through. It ended up launching my video art career and working with Colin Campbell, who invented video art working with FARC (Colombia) tapes artefacts recorded for secret communication.

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

#117

Post by nitrogen »

lm28469 wrote: post #112
einpoklum wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But - and sorry for the morbid question - what about when you grow older, and may not be able to take care of that? Or when you pass away?

You have to come to term with the fact that 99.99% of (your/all) medias are useless in the grand scheme of things. Imagine having to take care of the backup of your ancestors data on 10 generations, that'd be ridiculous.

Imagine having to take care of the backup of your ancestors data on 10 generations, that'd be ridiculous.

I had an idea about this but realized it would be far more useful for more sinister purposes and stopped.

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

#118

Post by kaetemi »

jamiek88 wrote: post #69
ris wrote: post #50

Related: rescuing historic teletext pages from VHS recordings of broadcast TV: https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext

WOW! What a brilliant idea! So obvious now, the teletext data must have been embedded into the tv picture thus captured by VHS recording. This got me very excited, I'd love to rebuild the old Ceefax 101 pages.

I remember trying out teletext from a VHS whe I was a kid. Was interesting that it worked. Lots of glitches in the data, though.

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

#119

Post by rasz »

dsego wrote: post #113
rasz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDROM bit rot is mostly the paint flaking off, but the real data is stored in the plastic. DVD should be even harder to bitrot because data is entirely inside the plastic. Burned disks are another story.

You must be joking. Try to scrape off the paint and keep the plastic, see if it works.

bitrot is paint flaking off, not someone purposefully scratching it off

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

#120

Post by rasz »

slim wrote: post #109
allovernow wrote: post #3

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've always wondered what makes micro SD cards not suitable for long term storage. What makes them decay

Its flash memory, physically pushing electrons into a jar and hoping to count them later before all leak out. Endurance tests of SSD drives showed unplugging a worn drive for a couple of days was enough to lose all data. Not to mention SD cards usually get the lowest grade of flash memory.
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