[John Williamson]

On 10/05/2019 15:10, Mike Rivers wrote:
On 5/10/2019 7:34 AM, geoff wrote:
But it is little effort to have multiple backups on several different
types of media, all bit-perfect.

That it's little effort isn't the point. You HAVE to do it. If you look
at short long term life, say 20-30 years, tape will likely still be
playable. Digital media may not.

The only digital media I've ever had trouble playing back have been a
couple of years old optical discs, where it turned out the dye wasn't as
stable as I had been told it was. But copies turned up on a very old
machine, so that was okay.

I use various PCs for all sorts of things from answering e-mail to
editing video. The rule is that I click a mouse to run a short program
every time I close down, and all the data gets synchronised to another
PC or network storage. The synchronised copies are then checked. All
this happens while I sleep. I still have readable and usable copies of
30 year old files that started life on 5 1/4" floppies....

I have a few tapes that old that can't be played back due to various
problems, not least of them being finding a working machine to play them
back on.

I do occasionally have a problem finding a way to play back some older
video files that surface on other systems, but my current editor can
handle most of them and I have converters that will handle all of them.
I can edit and convert all audio formats that there have ever been.

When I use the digital desk to record a gig, I stick a USB stick into
the slot and back the recordings up while I'm packing the mics, bits of
electric string and sticks into their cases. By the time I've finished
packing up, the client has a bit perfect copy of the master recordings
of all channels plus a rough mix to take away, and do whatever they wish
with. Once I get back to base, the desk gets backed up to at least one
place immediately, and over a few days to half a dozen independent
places. Then I edit and mix using one of the copies.

Try doing that with tape....

--
Tciao for Now!

John.