Digital Rot and the Best Backup of All

This week, preparing for my father’s funeral led me down a rabbit hole of old photos and digital rot. We thought we were never really a photo family, but it turns out there are hundreds of them. All the photos we've selected for the service are old 'proper' photos that had to be scanned in. You know, the ones you used to pick up from the local chemist or branch of Snappy Snaps that had helpful stickers placed on them with friendly advice such as “Hold the camera still you idiot” or “Don’t you have autofocus?”

Whilst scanning (actually, James was doing the scanning because that’s one technology I’m not allowed anywhere near), I was thinking that we now have a software backup of these hardware photos, and so maybe I should scan more.

Then I found a silly video file from around 2004 that I remember well. This was filmed on miniDV tape and dumped into an early iMac G5 for editing—I remember being super excited that you could control the tape transport in the camera from iMovie at the time!

As an audio engineer once told me, a digital file needs to exist in at least three places at once or it might as well not exist at all. I followed that rule: the video was backed up to an external hard drive, a DVD, and eventually the cloud. But there’s a problem.

The file won’t play. It isn't supported by any current software, and the software to convert it is no longer supported by my current operating system. The data is there, but the ability to play it—the software—is gone. The DVD no longer plays either, as DVD-R discs were ink-based and the ink has faded...

The Durability of Analogue

What's the best defense against digital rot?

The late, great Steve Albini always said that he recorded to analogue tape because it will always traverse digital file-based systems, and can exist for long enough for an artist to find an audience. And he had a point. We can still play tapes from the mid-20th century, and wax cylinders from even earlier, but I couldn't play a video file from 2004!

I put any hopes of being able to watch that video on hold while I explored the rest of the hard drive. My backup hard drives are all of the spinning variety, and I always spin them up and mount them every few months, as well as backing up important files to more modern alternatives. But there were so many files on this hard drive, admittedly 20 years old now, that just won’t load on anything. Home movies that won’t play, DAW projects that won’t load, and photos that can no longer be viewed.

A Twist in the Attic

But then things took a turn. I did find some audio files from the late 1990s that are firmly etched in my neural pathways. A few crazy gigs that were recorded with a stereo tape machine pointing at the PA, and a few early demos of mine that were used to show my band roughly how the song went.

And they were all awful—a lot worse than I remembered!

The same held true for the video I’d been trying to find earlier. I have an old G4 eMac in the studio from around the same era and, somewhat miraculously, it fired up first time, mounted the hard drive, and played the video!

And it was awful… not at all how I remembered it. I won't be playing it at the funeral.

The Best Backup of All

And this got me thinking. Sometimes the best backup we have is the one built in to our brains—our memories.

Watching that video, and listening to those audio files of early demos, has actually tarnished my memories of them which, along with the passage of time, had polished them up a bit and filtered out the awful audio quality and grainy video footage.

I have hundreds of videos, photos, and audio files from more recent times that do still play, that I never watch, look at, or listen to. Why? Because my memories of them are far better than the actual physical evidence, and I cherish those memories more than the technology-based capture! These days, I’m one for watching a concert with my own eyes, not through a phone screen.

So what’s the take-home from this?

Well, it’s not that you should immediately go and microwave all of your hard drives! But sometimes we do value the administrative over the emotional. The next time you go and snap a photo of a recording session, be it for your own library or to post on social media, think about whether you’ll ever actually want to look at it again. And, if you’re sure you will, maybe snapping away with an analogue film-based camera will ensure that it will endure the test of time!

Thanks for reading, apologies again for not having an accompanying video, but it’s been a crazy few weeks, and I’m writing these whilst out and about, as and when I can.

See you next week.

Lots of love,

Mark