How are digital masters stored?

I've been curious for a long time as to how digital multis and masters are stored. What I mean by stored, the information and what physical medium. Is the older stuff usually on u-matic tapes or is it somehow transferred to a HDD or SSD as a safety copy?

 

Especially as there very much is a thing called "Data degradation". Linus Tech Tips had a huge problem with what they thought was a good solution to archiving all their raw material for their videos. I could absolutely see digital masters already being damaged or gone.

 

That's a very good question.

I'd hope a this point labels have dedicated servers for digital storage and archiving, and those backed up on another site somewhere in case of fire/distaster. Logistically this wouldn't be difficult to set up.

 

As far as I understand it you have to renew the storage - more often that you'd think - to prevent corruption.

Plus what are we talking about now? 40 years of digital? Hard drives won't just work like tapes no matter how they're stored.

 

So in the case of the Universal fire, Would or should the digital transfers, masters etc. have been stored elsewhere?

 

Let’s hope these record labels have decent IT people working for them to manage this.

 

I would think that the long-term storage costs for digital could be higher than anyone expects. Wouldn't it be cheaper to simply make a high quality back-up analog copy of the digital master?

 

Well obviously, by hand...with your fingers.

 

That all depends on whether or not the other storage location is on fire as well.

 

It would take periodically backing up the digital information in one from or another. I would hope that digital masters since the 70s and 80s have been copied off their original physical storage to a cloud by now.

 

Just another day of mastering at Mobile Fidelity.

 

All the latest Universal releases I bought which included a download were 128kbps mp3s, none of them even tagged properly. A total insult and not something that induce confidence in their overall handling of digital media.

 

I switched photos on you...

 

In the 80s it possibly was Umatic tapes. Nowadays it's hard drives (and backup servers).

 

Bugger!

 

The more I learn about NAS servers and the challenges to their safety the less confident I remain about our efforts. Ransomware seems to get more pervasive every year, users get lazy or overconfident about backup procedures, the simplicity of holding onto ones and zeroes shouldn't be this nerve-wracking.

When I grew up, I learned about Blackhawk Films being started because of the location of film stored in caves, and then followed adventures of people finding long-thought-lost copies in old theaters in colder climates. These kept our early media safe for decades, albeit unknown in some cases.

I shudder the day we have our recordings being chased around the world from server-to-server by online gremlins - who knows, maybe even inspired by watching a Mission: Impossible, heist-type movie.

 

Well, you have a server, and then you have a clone of said server backed up somewhere else. You sync them at regular intervals.

The same logic that powers Netflix or Spotify or whatnot. (I think a bunch of them are on AWS). Now that's a bit different because those are feeding data outwards to millions of people, but there isn't just like, one server box somewhere storing the entirety of Apple Music or Hulu, y'know? There's not just one box with some hard drives in it in a warehouse somewhere, there's at least one (hopefully multiple) copies of all that data in different locations.

If I were a small label without that kind of power, I'd definitely keep digital backups of everything my label owned on different hard drives, keep one in a safety deposit box, and maybe a cloud storage server or two. Sounds like a pain in the ass but a lot of it can really be automated, and probably still more sound than counting on 100% of your tapes/CD-R's/DAT's/etc to stay 100% intact as the years pass.

 

This sounds like it was sourced from a DAT tape that no longer plays back without errors:

(from early album mixes, 28th March 1994 - included in The Woman In Me - Diamond Edition [Discogs])




At first I assumed that it was just a problem on Apple Music but it's the same on the CD (and this unofficial YouTube upload - oddly enough this one song from these early album mixes is missing from the official channel).

 

Yeah, there's no perfect solution, it's just a matter of finding the best one and knowing that everything has risks. People love to pick apart faults in any plan, without offering their 100% failsafe alternative.

I have a personal library of files and whatnot that is very valuable to me personally, lots of boots and old CD masters and whatnot, I used to keep a clone of it at my office when I had an office, now I just run a clone of that drive to another HD since I don't have an office anymore, so the only risk is really a fire. I should probably get another external HD and keep a copy in a safety deposit box or something. Honestly, solutions on a small label/business level aren't that difficult, I'd think, just require a little upfront investment and making sure you do what's required to keep everything up to date and safe.

 

Why do you think that? Just curious. Tape costs are astronomical now. And then you would no longer have a clone of the digital master.


Dan

 

At Universal, on a stick in someone’s desk drawer.

 

I think it's an active and expensive process - possibly getting cheaper all the time now. I'm not sure what a small label does, I'm not sure what they did in the 90s. But as I say, there's probably no finding a rare hard drive in a garage and expecting it to work I think - like with a tape. I suspect much of the older stuff has gone - even if the artist think they still have it.

 

Looks like someone lost their car keys.

 

In theory, digital masters should provide sound as perfect as the day they were recorded, forever.

In practice, it's a s--t show--especially for stuff recorded to older digital tape formats. Many of these are degrading quickly (if not entirely unplayable), and even when that's not the case, the hardware to play them back is increasingly difficult to source.

There's broad realization that you need to migrate everything in the digital domain to modern formats such as hard drives, and they need to be multiply backed up to the cloud or to other hard drives in other facilities. And that you'll need to continually renew them to new hardware over time. (Hard drives can go bad just sitting on a shelf).

By comparison, analog tape is a dream. Some decent climate control and they're stable for a very long time. (Excluding the whale oil debacle of the '70s).

And here's the very bad news: A lot of digital masters were NOT properly updated because they weren't properly returned/delivered to the labels and/or were outtakes or whatever. For analog reels, it's not a big deal. You find the analog tape in the old drummer's basement and even though it's covered with mold, you can clean things up and get a good copy out of it. But you find that old 3M digital reel master in the basement and...too bad, so sad.