Learning Digital Preservation the Hard Way

I used to hear an adage of computer use that “there are two kinds of computer users - those who have experienced a hard drive failure and those who WILL experience a hard drive failure”  Meaning of course, that everyone is going to experience a hard drive failure eventually.  In my memory that adage comes from a time before there were IT departments and off-the-shelf virus protection and back-up packages.  It should be easier now to protect one’s data, but that doesn’t mean that it gets done.  I’m one of those who experienced a hard drive failure early on and so I’m probably a little better than most at making regular backups.  However, that didn’t save me from a recent little digital archive crisis of my own.

I have a sideline career as a musician, playing and recording with a group that specializes in 18th century music.  We have recorded four albums to date and recently realized that we needed to reprint the earliest of those, first recorded in 2001.  As we went to place a reorder we were faced with a series of data failures which have been made all the more poignant in light of the reading I have been doing on preservation in general and digital preservation in particular.

Lessons learned and how they apply to the world of preservation.

Failure no. 1 - at the time of the original production the graphic artist gave us a disk (a zip disk, we’ll get to that later) with the backup files for the cover and liner notes.  We did not verify that the files were complete, and they weren’t.  Preservation lesson -  do a complete inventory of any materials that you receive as soon as possible so you’ll know if there are any missing pieces while they might still be acquired.  In our case going back to the source now is impossible as the artist passed away a couple years ago.

Failure no. 2 - the production company experienced a catastrophic server loss during Super Storm Sandy lost all their archived design files from prior to 2012. Technically this wasn’t our fault, the but preservation lesson is this: If you are preserving any “too important to lose” digital information (whether born digital or transferred) budget for off-site storage and create a backup. Then build updates for that backup into your maintenance schedules (see item #3)

Failure no. 3 - We did not migrate our own data as formats and carriers changed.  Preservation lesson - digital information must be constantly maintained.  Files need to  transferred to new carriers as storage formats evolve.  Files also must be transferred into new versions of software as those formats change.  And if you are going to keep original materials on original carriers, be they zip disks or 8-track tapes, then you also need to keep compatible playback equipment, along with whatever drivers are necessary to make them function.  In our case we were hit with a double whammy here, zip drives are no longer common, and the program that the artist had used is now obsolete. So when we did finally locate a zip drive and extract the files we discovered that half were missing (see point no.1) the production company was unable to use them.

The only thing that’s going to save us here is that we happen to have most of the photos and text built into our website.  So now we’re in the process of copying and converting all the components and trying to rebuild the cover, case, and liner notes from scratch.