What Happens When Even the Backups Fail?

If the Internet has made one thing in popular culture abundantly clear, nostalgia is a potent force. It makes us look back on our formative years to experiences that shaped who we are today. One such example is music, but what would you say if we told you that this music could disappear forever?

If you consider that this music is stored on older hard drives, it should be no surprise that they could fail (and already have failed) at any moment. This is a prime educational opportunity for any SMB out there.

Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services

There’s a company out there called Iron Mountain that specializes in this type of data management and storage services.

Iron Mountain works with industries to ensure their document management and digital transformations are fulfilled without a hitch, including the music industry. The company offers archived storage for media assets for its clients. It has been doing this for years, storing client data on hard disk drives since the 1990s.

During a routine survey of its storage, the company found that thousands of HDDs—around 20%—were shockingly unreadable.

HDDs As the Standard Storage Format

The shift to HDD as a standard storage format was due to a similar problem to what we face today.

Masters, once they were converted to the commercial format of the time, were stored on tape. Tape degradation, however, was soon discovered thanks to the Guitar Hero franchise and 5.1 surround sound. Artists wanted to ensure that their work would be compatible with these new formats, and as a result, they found that their tapes no longer worked the way they were supposed to.

Whether the files were damaged by degradation, storage space conditions, or obsolete or missing, they no longer worked… and this situation exposed tape’s shortcomings in a way that prompted a quick shift in the preferred standard.

HDDs Have Their Own Problems

All that said, HDDs are far from perfect and come with their own fair share of shortcomings.

Let’s say that a nu metal band from the ‘90s have their masters stored on HDD. They eventually break up as the interest in their type of music wanes. Then, they get back together as interest in the genre is brought back to life, only to find that their old masters don’t work any longer.

It’s enough to make even the most hardcore metalhead thrash around with frustration.

The big challenge with HDD is that hard drives are not designed with long-term storage and archiving in mind. Their design, with moving parts, means that they are more prone to failure if any of the parts no longer operate. Furthermore, older file formats make these master files difficult to access, if not impossible.

While it’s a better solution than tape, HDD is still not ideal—for the music industry or your business.

How Can Your Business Respond?

Here are the two lessons your business should learn from this:

First, backup is crucial to your business’ survival. Think about how hard it would be for your business to build back from nothing. This is what would happen if you don’t have a backup system in place that can create multiple copies of your data and store them in a redundant manner in off-site locations.

Of course, that backup is useless if you cannot implement it.

Second, you need a backup strategy in place. This system should be automatic, but you need to have people trained on how it works on the off-chance that they need to know. Ideally, you can operate simply by running your business off the backups should you need to.

If you can guarantee the reliability of your backup through routine testing, you’ll be in a much better spot should the need to use your backup arise.

Backup is About Being Prepared

Learn more about how you can ensure your business is ready for any type of data loss incident by calling us today at (603) 499-4400.