[Info-vax] TK50 - this is annoying...

[John Wallace]

On Oct 11, 2:26 pm, koeh... at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob
Koehler) wrote:
> In article <2383fac5-e7af-4aa9-8057-ddef31490... at r9g2000vbf.googlegroups.com>, John Wallace <johnwalla... at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
>
>
>
> > I've probably said this already elsewhere... I did some work once with
> > some nice folk in the professional/broadcast audio business. They
> > needed their recording media+device to be 100% reliable in terms of
> > NEVER EVER losing data (digital equivalent of a studio master tape,
> > lose it and you're out of luck). These folk preferred not to use DDS/
> > DAT, even though another company in the group pioneered it. Some
> > flavour of magneto-optical was their working media of choice (which
> > will tell those in the know that this was a while back).
>
>    Hm, then they may have since lost their data.  Magneto-optical has
>    lifetimes.  Writeable optical has lifetimes.  Magnetic has lifetimes,
>    which can be greatly influenced by proper handling.
>
>    Knowing proper handling, following what you know, and eventually
>    making new copies is the only way to approach 100% reliable
>    recording.

Poor choice of words on my part, I suspect, sorry. The magneto-optical
copy in use in the studio must never ever lose data while it's being
worked on and is the only current copy. Once it's a finished work, it
can be transferred onto different media more appropriate for long term
archival. These folk didn't consider DAT/DDS was appropriate for
either use.

Clearer now? Maybe not.

My current employers used DEC RV20 at one stage for long term archive.
Not sure how readable those will be these days; hopefully they were
transferred to something more appropriate before the drives became
unmaintainable or unusable.