27,343.75 floppy disks

Holly molly! The first Mac I used had a single 128K floppy disk drive; the first one I bought had a 20Mb hard drive which I thought would be impossible to fill… I’ve pretty much filled the 3.5Terabytes of disk space attached to my quadcore Mac!!

If my maths is right, that’s 27,343.75 floppy disk drives!

Wo.

Which brings me on to a topic which may affect us all – archiving.

How do you archive and store your precious original media? What do you record on? Tape? Mini-disk? Solid state memory device of some sort? The BBC and other organisations have huge archiving systems and methods to keep thee records safe for future use and for posterity. Some of you will have interviewed the great and the good for your shows, other may have featured “the man in the street”, eventually all of this material will have historic value – perhaps the value of the long tail?

But how do you protect these valuable records?

There’s a series running on TV called The Thirties in Colour – fascinating because it sheds a multi-coloured light on an era that’s generally regarded as being black and white. But this is only possible because the original material was not only stored, but preserved.

Magnetic data degrades and accidents happen. 

What policies do you have in place for preserving your recordings? 

Could be worth thinking about. 

Cheers 

Neil