27 Nov
2021
27 Nov
'21
4:33 a.m.
In my experience 9 track tapes were not guaranteed to be readable after some interval. In
fact, a standard operations procedure was to copy important tapes to new media
periodically.
I distinctly remember a rather catastrophic error in the AT&T Worldnet ISP mail
system. It was running a third party email server product on a large cluster of big Sun
boxes. A new release was installed. It had bugs and curdled all of the customers’ data. It
got backed out and a huge restore from backup effort began, only to find that a bunch of
recently written tapes were unreadable. Needless to say, we had unhappy customers and, if
I remember correctly, some very negative press in the WSJ and the NY Times.
- Alan
On Nov 24, 2021, at 9:06 PM, George Michaelson
<ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote:
I have a relative who is an archivist, the sister-discipline to
librarians (Mike Lesk was at heart I think, in the library most the
time time. I say this, because I always think about Mike when the
topic of data and libraries comes up. He was nice to me at UCL and I
have a soft spot for anyone who was nice to me.)
Anyway, She tells me that the primary role of archivists is to help
people throw things away.
As a (sometime) scientist in (mostly) data, I know I have serial
hoarding disease. But I also know that NASA and other agencies only
found some things, by going back into the stacks to re-read old tapes,
without the "noise reduction filter" which had taken signal out.
So I feel your pain, loosing the tapes will have hurt. But I also know
along the path in time, Somebody had a role to play, curating the data
into the modern era. You're not alone, the BBC had this problem in
spades, re-using Umatic tape to save money. Ephemeral content which
turns out to be in some cases the probably only copy of what is data
to us now, but was junk to them then.
-G