There has been much discussion over the last few years about finding and saving original tapes of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk videos downlinked from the moon. There is also an exciting project going on to restore and digitize the Lunar Orbiter tapes from more than 40 years ago.

The Lunar Orbiter tape digitization folks have just posted a commentary that bears reading by all archivists who are holding tapes. You may link to it here. The main site is www.moonviews.com

NASA, in their press conference yesterday held at The Newseum, admitted that the original 14-track 1-inch instrumentation (IRIG) tapes that contained the slow-scan video direct from the moon were most likely recycled and reused for later missions. Apparently, over 350,000 reels of instrumentation tape were recycled by NASA over time. No one apparently thought to preserve the 45-odd reels of the original moon walk. (more…)

My storage systems have grown to keep up with storage needs. I am currently running two NAS units in RAID-5:

Unit #1 for client audio projects is a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with four 500 GB drives, providing about 1.3 TiB of storage.

Unit #2 for personal projects and general data is a Thecus N5200 Pro with four 1000 GB drives, providing about 2.7 TiB of storage.

These two units are then duplicated off-site and connected by a fibre optic link (currently running at 100 Mb/s while the rest of the network is running at 1000 Mb/s). (more…)

For many years, I had been in favour of the Primera Z1 small optical disc printer. When Primera discontinued this several years ago, I was not pleased and purchased two as spares, hoping at least the ribbons would continue.

It appears that I am not alone in thinking this is a good product as it has resurfaced as the U-Print CDP78, now in black, and available from many online distributors. The cartridges appear to be interchangeable with the Primera. I can now suggest that this is a good alternative for safe, long-lasting, and reasonably attractive text labeling of CDs and DVDs. It appears that the Teac P11 is also similar. The last time I checked, the Casio required manual rotation of the disk, rather than the Primera’s automatic rotation.

Please provide me with any feedback pro or con—preferably as comments to this post.

If you ever worry about a bit error happening to your files and not finding out about it, you should use MD5 checksums (or some similar method) to be able to verify that the file has not changed.

The general theory behind a checksum (or “Message Digest” = “MD”) is that it provides a unique 128-bit number for each and every file, based on its content. If one bit changes, the MD5 checksum (sometimes called “hash”) changes. The checksum is repeatable, does not permit discovery of two different files that produce the same checksum, and is non-reversible (i.e. you can’t create the content from the checksum). (more…)

Once again, an interesting post on Jill Hurst-Wahl’s Digitization 101 Blog. She started by discussing tape backup issues. In the comments, I discussed my solution of using multiple spinning disks. Another commenter, Ike, provided an extensive review of file system options and his opinions on what works (and doesn’t) for long-term storage. Ike’s comment is fascinating and has lots of food for thought. Here is the post. (more…)

My friend Susan Kitchens and her brother took their parents to the StoryCorps recording session in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. She blogged it here. One of the neat things is that between her article and the discussion she and I had in the comments, we have a good handle on most of the equipment that was used in the trailer. It’s a good selection in my opinion and shows how simply good-quality recording systems can be set up. Further discussions from a StoryCorps representative have shown how clever the setup is.

The question of how to format hard disks (i.e. what file system to use on them) for easy interchange is another FAQ. A recent experience brought home the fact that it is more complex than one might hope. The computer industry is headed towards universal readability, but it is not there yet. The most-able-to-be-read-and-written format appears to be FAT32, although my friend Eric Jacobs makes the point that NTFS is a more robust hard disk file system, and I have to agree. (more…)

Large-scale, enterprise-class storage is using combinations of both disc and tape. LTO tape appears to be growing more than any other format.

For those of us who are working at a much smaller scale, I have provided references on what I do for fairly robust storage on a budget. Please see these two attachments: description and map. It shows a unified (I hope) approach useful to small archives and businesses.

On March 12, 2006, Chris Goosman asked:

What does it take to point the family logins to the centralized “My Documents”? Does each user get their own “My Documents” folder or is it truly a central space that all users share?

Your page has inspired me to write up a similar document for the home/studio/office network here including my backup strategy.

I currently use a backup server with 750GB of Raid-5 running Retrospect, but I need a longer term archive storage and I found one of those LaCie NAS boxes like you use (the local one, with the 10/100 and firewire interfaces, not the newer one with gigabit and USB 2.0) for a great price and it’s on the way. I will be trying out ViceVersa which looks neat.

For the network, is your Netgear switch a layer 2 switch? I think I’ll be moving toward a layer 2 switch to handle a few different VLANs. I’m using Vonage for my own voice service which I’d like on it’s own VLAN, plus my wifes office computers on their own VLAN, my studio on a VLAN, and then soon I plan on putting together an Astrisk PBX and would want it on it’s own VLAN. But this is too much computer geek talk and not enough audio geek talk, so I’ll stop now.

I replied:

Hi, Chris,

Each “My Documents” is a separate “My Documents” folder in each user’s own logon – as is a “Favorites” which includes “Links” so no matter where you log in your IE looks the same. I move: “Favorites” and “My Pictures” and “Desktop” into the root of “My Documents” so they’re visible. Also move “Music” and “Videos”. I use Microsoft’s TWEAK UI PowerToy http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx to do this.

My hierarchy is root/family/person

That way, I can back up root/family and get everyone. I also have set permissions so my wife and I can see everyone’s space. My wife is worried about deleting stuff, so I made mine read only to her.

I am not using any managed switches, and don’t intend to go VOIP in the near future, but Skype may be in my future for long calls. The only thing I have (that I’m not using) that is at all fancy is the Netgear FVS-318 firewall which also has VPN capabilities, but I don’t have a VPN client installed (and yes, I know VLAN and VPN are different things).

Since I currently have dual firewalls “in series”, my kids’ laptops when they get them (years) will be connected between the two firewalls and I’ll have a small NAS box at that point to house their documents, and then pull it across the firewall with VVPro.