zombie84 said:
If your library has 100, 000 titles you want preserved, at roughly 200 GB per film thats 20 000 000 GB. But you can't have just one, because digital data is so easily corrupted, you would make a back up, so now its 40 000 000 GB. Not only do you have to pay the huge electric bill to keep those millions of hard drives spinning, you have to have a guy checking and maintaining them, and becase hard drives only have a lifespan of about 2 or 3 years, that means all 40 000 000 GB has to be back up almost bi-annually. Thats an enormous effort, not to mention a huge cost (just the act of telecining them alone would cost near a billion dollars).
I don't know where you get your numbers for hard drives, but it's definitely not accurate. I've got crappy IDE drives here that are 5+ years old and they're still ticking. And besides that, you obviously wouldn't store a single movie on a single hard drive. You'd use an array (RAID 5 anyone?). Shit, use RAID 5 with a hot spare for even more protection. The likelihood of having two drives go down at the same time in an array is pretty rare, but it can happen. That's why you use the hot spare. And on top of all that, yes, you'd still backup to tape, but tapes can very easily be tested for data integrity. You could even use mirrored RAID 5 arrays. You can also have redundant discs. And don't forget that you can get drives as small as 2.5" now that have huge capacities (500 GB+ per disc). So finding space for all those drives isn't going to be nearly the problem you make it out to be.
RRS-1980 said:
There is also another thing - and I'm surprised that noone mentioned it yet. Format compatibility. Reels can be "read" even after 50 years without problems here, but can you say the same about computer data? Ever tried to run 20-year-old program on modern system? Or imagine that you have to use those big 5+ inch floppies today - do you still use that obsolete drive in your 'puter?
Just like zombie said, it would require them to periodically "update" the hardware/software format the data is stored. And that costs $.
Maybe for a Hollywood studio with billions of dollars, but what do you do when the "reader" is no longer being produced? You'll at the very least have to build something to read it. Digital data is no different in that respect. As long as studios use open formats (mpeg2, mpeg4, VC-1), anybody can read the spec and write a program to read the file.
To answer your questions, yes I have. A 20 year old program will actually function just fine running in FreeDOS (I'll assume it's DOS based if it's 20 years old). As far as 5.25" floppies go, yes, I have had to hook those up in the past few years and pull data off them. Most of the time when data is left on media like that, it's because they've transitioned to another format and forgotten about the old stuff. I'd say a majority of the time, they don't end up needing what's on them anyway. I've done my share of rescuing data from 3.5" floppies, zip disks, and 5.25" floppies. As long as I was able to get a drive, most of the data was easily recovered. But none of those formats would be an issue now or in the foreseeable future. Everyone is moving to hard drive based storage, so all you'd have to do is move your entire data store into a larger capacity array as your needs grow (or as interfaces change). With the billions of dollars Hollywood has and the large IT staff, this shouldn't be a problem at all. They're already spending the money to increase storage everytime they work on a movie and do any CG to it. So it's not really an added cost.
