Longevity of documentation - Has anyone looked into albums?

[Eric Poncet [NunaSoft]]

Hi,
Thanks Suzanne for this point on longevity.
Here's my two cents on archiving strategy, and the merciless fight 
against media loss: everytime you get a new computer to replace the 
current one, don't just transfer all your files onto the new computer 
and get rid of the old one: take the old hard drive out of the computer 
and store it in a safe place. As most users, I change computer every 2-5 
years on the average, and my IT experience leads me to believe that the 
average hard drive longevity is significantly longer than 5 years 
(though I have no stats on that point). Over the past 25 years, I've 
always saved my old hard drives and kept them in different safe places. 
I've been able to successfully read files from them whenever I tried to. 
Due to the incremental nature of this strategy, that also means I have 6 
archives of those 25 year old files spread over different places, and 
I'll have 3 more in the next 10 years, etc. Not to mention the automatic 
daily+weekly+monthly backups of my current PC.
Such an incremental archiving scheme would be way harder to implement 
with analog media. The cost? About 10 minutes of work to open that good 
old PC, unscrew the drive and unplug it.
Cheers,
Eric Poncet
CTO
www.nunasoft.com

Suzanne Urbanczyk a écrit :
> I have enjoyed reading about the various issues that arise with 
> digitizing cassettes.  Many thanks!!
>
> The discussion has reminded me of a larger issue w.r.t. the long-term 
> status of audio recordings.  The question I have is whether anyone has 
> looked into copying materials onto LPs - the old-fashioned analog 
> album?  The reason I ask is that I have been thinking that this might 
> be one form of media that has the potential to retain its longevity 
> more than others.  Even 50 year old scratched, gummy old albums can be 
> cleaned up and played and do not rely on whether this or that 0 or 1 
> is at the beginning of the file,  whether the compression algorithm 
> changes the signal, the program changes, etc. etc. or whether the 
> media is going to disintegrate after being played after 20 years.
>
> The album has been making a come-back lately and there are different 
> types of presses that I am aware of, but want to know if anyone knows 
> anything more about this.  Ida Halpern (ethnomusicologist) used to 
> take a "record-maker" (the picture I saw looked like a "record", not a 
> wax cylinder) with her to document music of the Pacific Northwest and 
> I wonder if there is anything like what she used that is available today.
>
> many thanks,
>
> Su Urbanczyk