About a fifth of the hard drives it receives from the media industry for service are completely dead, said enterprise information management company Iron Mountain, which specializes in records management, information destruction, data backup, and data recovery. This means information contained within those drives — including studio masters, live sessions, and everything in between — could be lost forever unless the recording label has backed up the missing data in another storage drive or medium.
“It’s so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there,” Robert Koszela, the Global Director for Strategic Initiatives & Growth for Iron Mountain Media & Archive Services, told Mix. “Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything’s in order. And both of them are bricks.”
However, just like tape, hard drives also deteriorate — with most commercial drives rated to last for only three to five years. Even if you store them in the most optimum condition, you’ll find that even drives designed for archival storage will eventually die. Unfortunately, most often, the only time that a studio will open its archives is if it needs to look for original masters for commercial use. If it has waited too long, then it might be too late to recover the drive that it needs, resulting in the loss of all the information contained within.
