Old Media Preservation

You hear of media companies that delete old music and video from their own archives. People saving what they can may have the only copy left in existence.

I'm not against reproduction if care is taken to preserve what can be preserved, as close to the original as possible while giving credit, compensating creators, etc. In your example, I think reproduction/conservation technology was available but the studios couldn't justify spending the time/money it would cost to preserve their entire library. Who would have paid for that? I don't know. Supposedly, half of Van Gogh's entire lifetime output was burned because he

This isn't new. Lots of old (pre-Internet) media was lost forever because storage was expensive and it was considered not worth it. As an example, there are a bunch of Doctor Who episodes which are lost forever because the BBC back then didn't consider it worthwhile to keep them and overwrote the tapes.

You see it happening already, people are finding e.g. old tape drives from MOS Technology (http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5256) which could contain valuable information about the design of some older processors and such, but they're unreadable and/or rotted. Same for older films, which are finally getting painstakingly restored and digitized.TL;DR if you're making

Doesn't prevent them from digitizing and storing on something less volatile than old film reel.

There are as many goals in collecting as there are collectors. Many collectors do not want to use their items as some of the items are pushing 40 years old and will not last forever. Every disc read and manual flip subtracts from their life. This may all sound silly, but compare this to Silent Era films. 75% of films from that time period are gone, forever [0]. We are still in the beginnings of the medium of games and we could fall prey to the same mistakes as previous mediums. Some section of t

As someone who spent the last 2 days figuring out how best to digitise my father's old Hi8, Digital8 and MiniDV tapes, I take umbridge with this!Keep originals if you can, but make copies ASAP, as close to lossless as possible. Don't depend on the right hardware being around in the future.

Get a cheap tape deck and digitize them. They are just containers of information that will otherwise wear out. After that, get rid of both and enjoy the contents any time.

On this subject you can dive into the story of the missing "Doctor Who" TV serials.Some tape of master's were infamously reused to store other contents. Beside the whole archive problem come from the reusable nature and scarcity of the chosen storage. I think I've read something about reusing paper as well in medieval time.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki&#

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