Archiving your media: Where to start?

Kelly Pribble, Director of Media Recovery Technology at Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services, is a veteran studio engineer, studio builder, archivist and inventor. In March 2022, he was issued a patent for Media Recovery Technology. Before joining Iron Mountain, Pribble reopened the legendary Nashville “Quadrafonic Sound Studio” in 1988. The next year he purchased the building next door and built an additional three studios, providing Nashville with its largest recording complex at that time. After more than a decade of running Quad Studios, Pribble left Nashville for London, where he worked closely with record producer Martin Terefe. Together they built “Kensaltown Studios” in West London, an eight-studio complex that still thrives today as one of West London’s premier studio locations. With a career spanning over three decades, Pribble has worked extensively in Nashville, London, New York City and Rio de Janeiro.

In all media, preservation and archival are fundamental. In my current role at Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services, I deal with basically every format under the sun – obsolete and archaic formats, all the way up to the most current state-of-the-art technology. I often have to restore lost, damaged or otherwise inaccessible data, and we have been able to come up with some pretty ingenious methods for doing so. But make no mistake – most of the time, when data is lost, it’s lost for good. And increasingly in recent years, the culprit has been the same: a failed hard drive.

I remember a general attitude a few decades ago when larger-capacity hard drives became affordable and ubiquitous: that our archival and preservation woes might be solved forever. We had a good handle on how to convert analogue audio into high-resolution digital, and we could form folders and directories at the click of a mouse, and copy data to other drives to our heart’s content – what could go wrong? And hard drives continue to be the primary way we all work today, accessing data efficiently (mostly) without issue. However, with a few decades of hindsight and more and more people taking the long view into future generations, it is clearer than ever how fickle hard drives are as a manner of long-term storage. This issue is not limited to the music industry either: basically every bit of information since the 1990s ultimately lives somewhere on hard drive space. And those hard drives will, inevitably, fail. Take a distant enough projection on a long timescale, and there is a certain likelihood that some or all of our information will essentially evaporate and be lost forever. 

Why do hard drives fail? The physical mechanisms that spin the disc wear out, the lubrication wears out, the disc itself gets scratched or broken, there are failures in the power source, software formats change, partitions clash, etc. There are a lot of variables at play here, but they all suggest that hard drives are not a robust format for the long-term preservation of data.

We use a term called “born-digital” to describe media that originates on a hard drive (for instance, a Pro Tools session) rather than an outside physical format. And then usually, the archival and preservation process just involves more hard drives. In recent decades, this represents the vast majority of music, film and TV projects and beyond. There is a real fear that we will encounter what is called a “digital black hole” of media from, say, the late 1990s through the early 2010s, when more creators became wiser and less careless about their backup regimen. 

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Luckily, there are things that can be done, and they all involve different methods of data migration. Backing things up to additional hard drives is always a good idea, but it’s only a temporary fix, considering all of those hard drives are bound to fail eventually. SSD drives are a bit newer, and they have no moving parts, so they are definitely less prone to fail; however, since they have come of age more recently, we don’t have enough information to know their efficacy in the long run. But at least in the short term, they are more reliable than “spinning” storage. Cloud storage is also a great practice, although ultimately that data resides on someone else’s server, which is probably more robust than a store-bought external USB hard drive, but a hard drive nonetheless, and therefore prone to the same issues over a longer time span. In my opinion, the wisest format to rely on for data migration backup would be a tape-based system, like an LTO. Although you’re somewhat limited by the available space on a cartridge, the success rate of the tape backup formats is phenomenal. 

As an interim measure, fire up your hard drives to make sure they still work, and copy the data to another device. You don’t know – even if it fires up today, it might not fire up tomorrow. And the other key is metadata. On anything that you have, if you’re storing anything, metadata is key. Everything should be labeled where possible. You need to know the date, what software you’re using, what version of say Pro Tools or whatever DAW you’re using, etc. If you can’t access the data in the future, or you simply cannot find it because nothing was labeled properly, it might as well be lost, even if your hard drive is still working fine!

I will continue to strive to get the word out: people must look at and take inventory of their assets, going back to 1970 or before. If that doesn’t happen, there’s a chance that they’re going to be lost forever. We are seeing it hit home with well-known artists, record labels and other media organizations that their analogue master tapes and hard drives just aren’t going to last forever, and that awareness needs to spread to independent creators. We are each responsible for our own backup hygiene, and there is no better time to start than today.