[accrual]

> It is a '70s 1200ft 3M tape, likely 9 track, which has a pretty good chance of being recoverable.

Not old enough to have this kind of knowledge or confidence. I wonder if instead one day I'll be helping some future generation read old floppies, CDs, and IDE/ATA disks *slaps top of AT tower*.

[retrac]

You might be able to use that old floppy drive. But you won't be able to use that old Pentium machine the drive is in.

Because you will need several hundred gigabytes of RAM and a very fast IO bus.

The gold standard today for archiving magnetic media is to make a flux image.

The media is treated as if it were an analog recording and sampled at such a high rate that the smallest details are captured. Interpretation is done later, in software. The only antique electronics involved are often the tape or drive head, directly connected to a high speed digitizer.

And indeed that appears to be the plan Al Kossow has for the tape: https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-November/032765.htm...

As for CDs, I don't see the rush; the ones that were properly made will likely outlast human civilization.

[squarefoot]

> As for CDs, I don't see the rush; the ones that were properly made will likely outlast human civilization.

Printed ones will last a lot more, but writable ones will degrade to unreadable state in a few years. I lost countless of them years ago, including the double backup of a project I worked on. Branded disks written and verified, properly stored, no sunlight, no objects or anything above them, no moisture or whatever. All gone just because of time. As I read other horror stories like mine, I just stopped using them altogether and never looked back.

[Zardoz84]

Don't forget about the mold that eats cd and dvds for breakfast. I saw a few dvds damaged by it

[fsckboy]

>As for CDs, I don't see the rush; the ones that were properly made will likely outlast human civilization.

recordable CD-Rs or DVD-Rs do not last close to that long, and those are the ones that hold the only copies of certain bits (original versions of software, etc) that people are most interested in not losing.

manufactured CDs and DVDs hold commericial music and films that are for the most part not rare at all.

[accrual]

Yes, good distinction. Recordable media will most likely contain data an individual intended to save. But because it's recordable, the dyes and structures on the disc aren't as stable.

Long-lasting, good quality mastered optical media is probably mass produced and has many copies, including a distinct and potentially well-preserved source.

It's probably fair to say that a lot of mixtapes (mix CDs?) from the early 2000s are lost to dye issues...

[quantummagic]

> lost to dye issues...

Not that it helps to recover older data, but things are better with Blu-ray today; at least if you buy decent quality discs. Advertised lifespans are multiple decades, up to 100 years, or even 500 years for "M" discs. And in the "M" disc case, it's achieved by using a non-organic dye, to avoid the degradation issues.

[themafia]

> structures on the disc aren't as stable.

Which is why the format has generous error correction built in.

[easyThrowaway]

'that were properly made' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I've got a bunch of Sega Saturn and AKAI/Zero-G sample cds that are basically unreadable already due to disc rot. There was a lot of cheaply made optical media floating around in the late '90s.

[WorldMaker]

Also we've started seeing some of the first wave of "properly made" CDs from the 1970s/1980s degrade. 45-50 years is a good, long run, but it is certainly not "forever".

[noir_lord]

and anything you "burnt" yourself has an even shorter life.

In many ways our storage media has become more ephemeral as capacities have increased - except LTO at least which seems to keep up with storage demands/price and durability, LTO is eternal (or long enough to be able to move it from LTO-(N-4) to LTO-N at least).

[padjo]

It’s so obvious in retrospect but I never considered they would do this! Thanks for sharing.

[codezero]

Just anecdata, but I had this concern when I worked in academia and we backed up all our data to writable DVDs. I was there 10 years after the start of the project and I periodically checked the old DVDs to make sure they weren't corrupted.

After 10 years, which was longer than the assumed shelf life of writable/rewritable DVDs at the time, I never found a single corrupt file on the disks. They were stored in ideal conditions though, in a case, in a closed climate controlled shelf, and rarely if ever removed or used.

Also, just because I think it's funny, the archive was over 4000 DVDs. (We had a redundant copies of the data compressed and uncompressed, I think it was like 3000 uncompressed 1k compressed) there was also an offsite redundant copy we put on portable IDE (and eventually SATA) drives.

[Spooky23]

Thank your procurement agent and hvac guy.

My team used to maintain go-kits for continuity of operations for a government org. We ran into a few scenarios where the dye on optical media would just go, and another where replacement foam for the pelican cases off gassed and reacted with the media!

[codezero]

I was the procurement guy for many years, and we had no HVAC guy - we were in a state university, and there was nothing special about the DVDs we bought, they were from Newegg and other retail places, we did buy the most expensive ones because our grants allowed us to, so maybe that's a factor.

I have no doubts (hence my anecdata statement) that there could be bad DVDs in there, or that maybe over a longer time horizon that the media would be cooked.

[accrual]

Wow! That's pretty interesting. I can imagine wanting to store optical media in Pelican cases or similar for shock protection, ability to padlock, etc. But yeah -- what's the interaction between whatever interior foam they chose and the CD-R media and dyes? Especially after 10+ years of continuous contact?

Optical media is probably best stored well-labeled and in metal or cardboard box on a shelf in a basement that few will rarely disturb.

[Spooky23]

It was a really fun project. We basically made these disaster kits, with small MFPs, tools, laptops, cell radios and INMARSAT terminals hooked to Cisco switches (this was circa 2002-3) and a little server. We had a deal that let us stow them in unusual places like highway rest stops.

We’d deploy them to help respond to floods or other disasters.

One of the techs cooked up a great idea — use Knoppix or something like it to let us use random computers if needed. Bandwidth was tight, but enough for terminal emulators and things like registration software that ran off the little server. So that’s where we got into the CD/DVD game. We had way more media problems than we expected!

[hmstx]

Most of the CDs we burned at home in the 1998-2005 era were still good in recent years, some DVDs in there too. Luck, I guess. No delamination or rot. Really, my main problems were figuring out file types without extentions (burned on classic Mac OS) and... appropriate programs to open them (old Painter limited edition from 1998 needs... the same thing, pretty much).

OTOH, some 12 years ago I worked IT at a newspaper and we were moving offices. The archivist got an intern in a room in our section of the building and together they spent a month or two scanning, then committing whatever physical media to burned CDs (maybe DVDs) before chucking the former to the bin. Maybe a year after the move, a ticket was opened and I went to check the disks. None of them worked, CRC failures all over. I don't think they even considered testing them, or burning duplicates, or maybe they used a really bad drive which would produce media unreadable by anything else - although I'm only aware that this is a thing with floppies for example.

[accrual]

Cool tale! I have observed a mix of viable and unreadable user-burned CD media from the late 90s and early 2000s. It definitely depends on the quality of the media, quality of the burn/drive/laser, and how well it was stored interim.

My oldest disc is some bright blue Verbatim disk my childhood friend made for me so I could play our favorite game at home pre-2000. I have a bit-perfect copy, but the actual disc still reads fine in 2025 when I last tested it.

[codezero]

Yep, quality is definitely a factor here, as much as it can be. We had NSF funding pre-2008, so there was plenty of budget for quality media. We spared no expense, and while I stayed in a $60/night hostel in SF for conferences, our rewritable DVDs were the best money could buy at the time lol.

[satiated_grue]

Take a look at floppy disk controllers like the AppleSauce, Greaseweazle, and Kryoflux for preserving floppies by recording at the flux-transition level.