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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

#81

Post by staticautomatic »

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?

Surely there's a startup for that.

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

#82

Post by EwanG »

FillardMillmore wrote: post #63
bobthepanda wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering we can read parchments thousands of years old, and stone tablets going back even further, perhaps we should focus efforts on copying what we can to the time-tested preserved data formats.

Im going to assume this is tongue-in-cheek, but if you happen to find a way to copy Mario 64 to a stone tablet, I'd love to hear about it.

Not THAT difficult - assuming you have enough stone tablets. I mean the program code exists. The problem I think you'd have (and true of most of these digital artifacts) is all the other hardware and software you would have to similarly encode to be able to recreate the machine and OS capable of running it...

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

#83

Post by allovernow »

xvector wrote: post #51
allovernow wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many times can you copy digital media before it degrades beyond error correction? I don't know the error rate per copied bit. I think this is an excellent place for neural networks. They can preserve vast amounts of data compactly for many data types because they statistically compress high level abstract data which can then be used to fill in regions with high error rate, although if you did that at a large scal…

> How many times can you copy digital media before it degrades beyond error correction? I don't know the error rate per copied bit. I am not sure I understand. Isn’t the error rate zero? And wouldn’t you be using checksums to verify perfect copies?

Can't be zero. At the very least if bits can be randomly flipped during storage from wayward radiation, they can be flipped on copy. Error correction only works if the number of flipped bits are below a threshold. But I don't know the order of magnitude of the error rate, I assume it's quite small given that computers work.

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

#84

Post by EwanG »

eaurouge wrote: post #60
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.

Not particularly user friendly, yet, but Arweave [0] was built specifically for this use case. 0. https://www.arweave.org/archiving.html

Sounds a lot like Archive.org? Am I missing something?

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

#85

Post by gjs278 »

staticautomatic wrote: post #81
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?

Surely there's a startup for that.

why would you trust a startup that could obviously fail and close tomorrow with long term storage

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

#87

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

jandrese wrote: post #26
iamphilrae wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio CDs can survive a bit of degradation to the odd data bits here or there; the music will just skip the millisecond of missing data and your ears won’t notice. Likewise with vinyl. Data discs on the other hand have the issue that if a single data bit is lost, a whole file could be corrupted, especially if it’s a zipped file. In addition, printed audio CDs are of a different build than CD-Rs which have been found…

It takes more than a single bit--there are Huffman codes built into the spec, but it is certainly possible for the bits to degrade enough to render a sector or even the whole disc unreadable.

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

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

#88

Post by Mountain_Skies »

WalterBright wrote: post #56
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.

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…

Wow, I had no idea that Empire went back that far. My friends and I had lots of fun staying up all night playing the PC version in high school. Glad to see many before us got to enjoy your work too.

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

#89

Post by rasz »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #87
jandrese wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes more than a single bit--there are Huffman codes built into the spec, but it is certainly possible for the bits to degrade enough to render a sector or even the whole disc unreadable.

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.

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

#90

Post by monocasa »

olivermarks wrote: post #70

What is the copyright situation with these tapes? I get the value of archiving and preserving digitally but if I'd invested time and money creating a vhs catalog of titles I'd be unhappy to see them suddenly all over youtube (assuming they had some appeal of course) with no ability to profit from them.

Archive.org is a library in the state of California, and legally has a little carte blanche when it comes to copyright.
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