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Posted by Fred on 02/13/07 16:26
Richard Crowley wrote:
> "Fred" wrote ...
>> I guess we are still learning what the lifetime
>> might be for thses tapes. but if it's valuable stuff,
>> now might be a good time to transfer to new media
>> while keeping the old as an experiment to see how
>> long the media lasts.
>
> We have analog tapes >50 years old that can still
> be played as good as when they were recorded.
> (Or maybe even better with modern equipment.)
>
> I have no doubt that my digital mag tape will well
> outlive me. I have ZERO expectation that ANY of
> my DVDRs will outlive me.
>
That's reassuring for the tape media. For important stuff I guess people
might want to keep an "off-site-backup" meaning they can make copies also
on tape and keep them in another building in case of fire, or whatever.
>> From what I've heard, they don't just get gradually
>> weaker, there is a point where they just don't play
>> anymore.
>
> They may gradually "get weaker" (likely not as fast as
> you think). But whether they "just don't play anymore"
> is function of many things. Tapes/discs that have been
> explicitly erased can be recovered by lab techniques as
> used by the CIA, NSA, etc. :-)
>
Or commercial data recovery companies, I expect. The do it for hard disk
drives. There are digital data correction techniques used in the recording
of the tapes, so the tapes can get weaker up to a point and the data
correction algorithms take care of it. When it goes beyond the point where
they can, then they may fail. I can't claim to know where that is, and it
likely depends on the tape, but some people have noticed it with some
tapes.
>> There was a guy at our club that bought a new
>> camera and used it for half a project when it started
>> giving him trouble. He sent iit in for repairs and they
>> fixed it well enough. They just needed to re-align the
>> heads, of course the 75 hours he had already shot
>> was unreadable on any machine after that. Had to
>> be done over.
>
> Or he could have had them align the camera to the bad
> tapes, dubbed/captured them, and then had the camera
> re-aligned properly. No need to do anything over.
I suspect they didn't have a record of where the heads were with the
original defective setting. It would have taken a lot of fussing around
and the repair centre was thousands of miles away. They had to send the
camera back by mail.
--
Regards, Fred
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