There's always some tension between those who don't care about keeping a personal collection of media and those who want to control and maintain certain titles to access and watch whenever they want, without third-party dependence.
One argument is that even your physical collection won't last "forever", but setting aside that the goal isn't to preserve your media forever, what about preserving them at least for your lifetime? Can you build a collection today that will remain accessible throughout your life?
The idea of a “future-proof” library
"Future-proofing" is a very different idea from simply preserving media. You can take, for example, a DVD and then store it in a way where it will last a century, but that hasn't "future-proofed" the content of that disc. It just means the disc has survived a certain amount of time.
So, for our purposes, a "future-proof" media library is one that can survive both timeand changes in technology over the years.
The fragility of digital media
Digital media such as CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray, hard drives, tape backup, and flash memory all have an expiration date. They each have their own unique paths to failure and their own special needs when it comes to storage and handling.
Hard drives in cold storage need to be flipped periodically to prevent all the lubricant from settling at the bottom or top of the drive. Which can lead to instant drive failure when you start it up. Flash memory can experience "bit rot" over many years of cold storage, as electrons leak out of the memory cells, eventually zeroing them out. Tape can suffer from degradation in the adhesive that holds the magnetic layer onto the tape itself. Optical discs, the factory-pressed type, can havedestructive oxidation of the metal data layer if the disc's seal is compromised.
These are just some examples of how the various media themselves can fail, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. It's not just that these mediacan fail. It's that theywill eventually. That's just entropy. It's a fact of existence.
The format problem: Reading your files in 20 years
The thing is, having the actual media fail due to age, wear, or damage is a pretty minor problem in the greater scheme of things. Digital data is easy to copy, which you can do well before the current medium fails, and nothing stops you from having multiple copies of the same data to make the odds of actual data loss very low indeed.
No, the real problem is being unable to access the data itself, because you no longer understand how it's been stored on that medium. At least with analog media like film, tape, or audio recordings, there's a direct representation of the original media captured in time. If they found a vinyl record 1000 years from now, and it somehow was still in good shape, you could re-invent a record player and hear the audio.
What about a CD or a DVD? All digital media store information as ones and zeros. You could certainly figure out that a disc or a tape has binary code on it, but without knowing the format used to store images, audio, or video, it would be extremely difficult to actually see what's recorded.
This might seem like some far-fetched future problem, but if you happen to have some media files from the '90s and the early web saved on a disc somewhere, would you be able to play them? Some might be stored in an obscure codec that nothing supports anymore, and the adage "the internet is forever" isn't actually true. Websites and data go missing all the time. It's why sites likeThe Internet Archive are so important.
How to actually preserve your collection
So, in order to build a media collection that has at least some future-proofing in it, you need to do more than take good care of your media. On the physical side, you need to follow thebasic 3-2-1 backup strategy:
- Three copies
- Two types of media
- One offsite copy
Then, every few years, you'll have to port your media forward. For example, if you had irreplaceable VHS tapes, then at some point you'd want todigitize them and convert them to DVD, then later you may want to convert those DVDs to a modern codec and load them to your media server, and now you'll want to maintain that copy by transferring it to a newer codec when needed, and storing it according to the strategy outlined above.
You may also want to include some way to keep access to those media as part of your collection. For example, buy a brand-new sealed disc player, test if it works, and then store it safely so that one day you'll have a way to play your media, even if your primary current player dies. For digital files, you may want to keep copies of the codecs used to make them, along with a portable player application that can play those specific files.
As with all things in the world of computers and digital technology, there's no such thing as true future-proofing, but if you want the next best thing, you need to think of your media collection as a garden rather than a museum. It needs tending if you want to enjoy it for as long as possible.
