It seems contradictory, but it’s true: Despite high-capacity, low-cost data backup, we are losing fragments of our past every day.
( Please take note that this article first appeared in the Mix magazine in August. )
Maybe back in the mid-2000s, my brother-in-law Rick turned me on to a book called How the Irish Saved Western Civilization, by the best-selling writer Thomas Cahill. It’s a fun read as far as famous, traditional nonfiction goes, and though its claims may be overstated at times ( certainly there were others working on the same thing ) and its views may skew in favor of St. Patrick, St. Augustine and another, its basic idea is good. And that premise is this:
When the Roman Empire was falling, ushering in the Dark Ages, education, and most certainly the recording and preservation of knowledge, fell out of fashion for the next 600 years or so. In light of this, the new monastic orders of Ireland, which were based on a foundation of education and the promotion of knowledge, began using their contacts on the continent to smuggle every piece of text they could find to Ireland. There, over the next half a millennium, from the Isle of Man in the east to the shores of Galway in the west, monks and scribes began copying those books and scrolls—over and over and over. That’s how the Irish saved Western civilization
A couple of things have recently appeared on my desk that have given me an entirely new perspective about those monks. Maybe, I thought, they loved their work, excited to be a part of the world’s first large-scale information backup. As long as it was properly preserved and then transferred with care to whatever distribution and storage systems might emerge in the future, it may be that they realized that the simple physical storage medium of ink on paper was forward-compatible with the Rosetta Stone and early pictograms and backward-compatible with the end of the human race.
READ MORE: Editor’s Note—Making the Connection.
The news story from late in June that Paramount had quietly shut down the MTVnews.com website, only to have it become a major story, was the first thing that made me reevaluate the monks. Where did the 30 years of unique music news, journalism, photography and videos go? Was it gone forever? We’re still in the throes of the fallout, and the site’s writers and personalities became outrageous and went public. Future-focused pundits made comments, and other music websites chimed in. In 2019, MySpace was back in the news with something similar, admitting that it had irreversibly lost 12 years worth of music and photos, affecting 14.2 million users and 53 million tracks. Just gone.
The media and entertainment industries, admittedly on a smaller scale, experience similar circumstances every day. After the new corporate owner assumes charge of storage, a small-town newspaper shutters its digital archive to reduce costs and is unable to locate its physical assets. You’re unlikely to find anything today unless you save a physical copy of that particular issue, which might have been an early-nineties regional punk music zine.
The third in a series of recent pieces on Iron Mountain’s technological efforts surrounding the storage, preservation, and archiving of music and media assets was reading this month’s feature by senior writer Steve Harvey,” It’s Time Talk About Hard Drives,” which made me rethink the monks. It was a bit shocking, but not too surprising, to learn that during a recent inventory survey of media assets, they found that 20 percent of hard disk drives were unreadable. It’s not Iron Mountain’s fault, the drives were brought in that way and there’s only so much they can do if a disk does n’t spin or a root system file is corrupted. If a song from the mid-to-late ‘ 90s was recorded, mixed, mastered and distributed all-digital, never touching a physical medium, there’s no guarantee that it will play back in 2024, or that the assets will ever be recovered.
Robert Koszela, director of North American Studio Operations at Iron Mountain, has seen it all in nearly 30 years as a media archivist, from issues with tape through today’s most up-to-date preservation and restoration technologies. He’s not up late at night worrying about doomsday scenarios, and he does n’t believe the sky is falling—so when he issues an industry-wide call for awareness and action regarding digital storage and playback, it’s best to pay attention
I’m not a chicken little either, and I’m not in favor of returning to paper storage and lab-reported photos. I believe that with a little digital and physical sleuthing, many assets can be recovered.
However, it’s also true that the majority of people today mistakenly believe that their information is digital and accessible forever when they click Save or Send. That’s simply not true. The term” the digital dark age” was first used in the mid-’90s to explain the contradictory idea that we are actually losing significant amounts of historical data every day as storage grows in capacity and prices year after year. That makes no sense, yet it’s true.
All you can really do is pay attention to your assets and make sure to future-proof them for all future formats is at the end of the day. Then backup, backup, backup. If that proves too time-consuming, you might try asking a monk for help. They have a solid track record.