[Marc Wielage[_2_]]

On Sat, 31 Mar 2012 04:19:40 -0700, William Sommerwerck wrote
(in article ):

I recently pulled out commercial open-reel tapes that were at least 35 years
old. All but one were in perfect or close-to-perfect condition. (Amazingly,
I'd bought a second copy of that recording some years back, so I had a good
spare.) I will eventually dub them to 8mm DAT -- unless I can find a
"reasonably" priced four-channel recording system for my computer. (8mm DAT
is not exactly robust.)
------------------------------snip------------------------------

I wouldn't do that if I were you, Bill. DAT is really flakey; I did some
archival restoration a few years ago, and we wound up using 6 different DAT
machines (including two $7000 Sony PCM-7040's) to play back tapes made from
1990-1998. DAT is a very, very impermanent medium.

BTW, DAT is only 3.8mm, not 8mm. I would trust something like this more to
digital files. A reasonable A/D converter is well under $500 these days; dub
it to high-res WAV files, then make several backups.

I try to operate on Peter Krogh's 3-2-1 Backup Rule:

http://www.dpbestflow.org/backup/backup-overview

Interestingly, the studios are using LTO-4 and LTO-5 data tapes for most of
their backups these days. But I've seen cases where the older DTF and DTF2
backup tapes failed, causing much consternation and disaster.

--MFW