Re: [ARSCLIST] Hard disk drives and DAT

["Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 07:59 PM 2007-03-27, George Brock-Nannestad wrote:

Hello, George,

I will address only part of your excellent post, but I think niche 
markets will always be there in some form or another, but it 
tri-colour carbon printing or dye transfer or...but you state at the close:

> The real awareness of our situation will only dawn on the general public when
> they discover that they have no familiy memories any more - photographic
> color prints will have faded, and nobody can reboot the family computer. So
> perhaps your long time constant in the feedback loop will finally pass enough
> energy that world-wide manufacture changes its course? Families would be
> better off if they printed color separations of their digital images as black-
> and white laserprints and kept them dry. Laserprint is more durable than many
> digital audio systems we have seen.

At present, in my archive, I need to be able to deal with 
photographic transparencies up to 5x7 inches, photographic negatives 
up to 4x5 inches--I actually have some legacy glass plate negatives 
from my mentor which are 8x10 inches. The bulk of this is somewhere 
around probably 40,000 slides mostly on Ektachrome, Kodachrome, and 
Fujichrome, with a few Agfachromes thrown in.

(as an aside, please see what I produced from silver paper prints of 
tricolour separations here: http://www.pbase.com/rlhess/image/23541265  )

I also have colour and monochrome prints in albums, going back to the 
1920s or before. Not all of them have appropriate metadata and there 
is no way to obtain it.

As to audio, I have 1/4 inch reels in 1- 2- and 4- tracks, 1/2-inch 
reels in 4-tracks, Dolby and dbx noise reduction, DAT, minidisc, 
cassettes with and without Dolby B and C, CD, a few 78s, lots of LPs 
and a few 45s.

If I were to properly store all of this stuff based on the 
appropriate standards, I would need at least one or two additional 
microclimates than what I have. Henry Wilhelm and Mark 
McCormick-Goodheart suggest building a cold room in your basement to 
store your family memories. A friend of mine just donated her 
father's war medals and his logbook (he was a WWII fighter ace) to 
the Canadian War Museum -- she felt better they take care of it than 
her niece who isn't really interested.

I actually think that I would much rather worry about the smaller 
physical footprint of a disk array -- even multiple disk arrays that 
has everything on it. Rather than learning to deal with a dozen or 
more technologies, you would deal with one umbrella technology.

I am encouraged by this. Yes, it's more fragile, BUT I CAN MAKE 
PERFECT COPIES! None of the other items can be perfectly copied (do I 
use the Ektachrome or the Fuji slide dupe film?).

One of my plans down the road is to get a Nikon Super Coolscan and 
scan a good bunch of the 40,000 slides. At 40 MB per slide -- and I'm 
sure I have many in-camera duplicates as I really hated duplicating 
and you never knew where the water drop would fall--that would 
require 1.6 TB. A mere drop in the bucket when I get to this.

The audio would be a few TB.

Before I leave this spinning orb, I would hope that I could have two 
identical RAID servers that would have each of my son's names on them 
and they could each take one. Then clone them in their backup systems.

It has always been a challenge to properly preserve history. I think 
in the digital world we can keep much more in much less space--and we 
can keep multiple copies.

In ten years, all of this would fit in one briefcase...now which son 
gets the briefcase with the new pair of DPA-4006TL mics is far more 
of a question <smile>.

Cheers,

Richard


Richard L. Hess                   email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada       (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.