Saved music from the 90s is lost due to hard drive failure

The music industry has been storing its music since the 90s on hard drives, but it has discovered that a fifth of them now fail to be read.

A very hard lesson was recently learned by the music industry as from the 1990s it changed the way of storing its music and from the classic bobbins it stored the songs on hard drives. But hard drives are dying, so he discovered that a fifth of the 90s drives are unreadable.

The task of storing the music has mostly been undertaken by Iron Mountain company, specializing in data storage and destruction with a focus on industries and particularly the music industry. Its job is to handle the archiving of the media industry's storage materials.

According to the website Mix Online, the company did a survey of its vaults and discovered an alarming trend: Of the thousands and thousands of archived hard drives from the 1990s that customers have been asking to reissue or modify, about a fifth are unreadable.

Iron Mountain has a broad customer base, but due to its focus on the music business, it means there are historical songs from the early to mid-90s that die.

Hard drives gained popularity over reel-to-reel magnetic tape as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, due to the disadvantages of magnetic tape, including wear and tear over time and fire.

But hard drives present their own archiving problems. Standard hard drives were not designed for long-term archival use. Iron Mountain claims that “If the disc's platters are spinning and not damaged,” it can access the content.

But "if it turns" is with a question mark. Musicians and studios now digging into their archives to remaster tracks often find that the drives, even when stored at the proper temperature and humidity, have failed in some way, with no option available for even a partial recovery.

The crux of the problem is that you can't trust any medium, so the proper storage technique is to copy the important stuff over and over again, to new storage. Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings stick, ssd drives lose charge, etc. And that hard drives will eventually fail is nothing new.