Somebody's got some 'splainin' to do...

Unfortunately,
You can't cure stupidity.

 

Universal continues to deny the extent of the loss, claiming that the NYT is exaggerating (poundhead)

 

GOOD LORD!

Can't even imagine it!

Shoot, I get majorly bummed if I misplace or accidentally erase a snippet of an original I'm working on. And trust me, I'm not rolling in dough with royalties!

I'm not a litigation-happy guy. But THIS needs reckoning!

Brian

 

Most storage vaults have a halon system. Water and tape...very bad. MGM used a place in Burbank called FilmBond. Temp and humidity controlled. No sprinklers...Halon. And I kept backups separate on the premises at the studio. My vault was not on the main sprinkler system. Halon. EPA came down on Halton...but its still used.

Before I started in the music department, they stored all of the masters on site. The 1994 quake took care of that though. Lost more than a few irreplaceable masters...Elmer Berstein's Hawaii among them.

Water and tape bad. Fire and tape worse. Something f'd up that's for sure.

 

In this day and age, why are there not redundant copies of everything important? Any big project I've worked on has had three backups of the systems at night. And that was just business as usual, I can't imagine neglecting a library of historical recordings. Other systems, take note!

 

These days, everyone on the block has cloud or alternate drive storage...yet a brazzillion $$$ company stores all the copies in one location? Some one needs chemical castration to prevent breeding.

 

See, that's what happens when you let people like this take the reins.

Spoiler

'Yeah, but will we release the new Nirvana Album in the next financial quarter? Well no reason to move those tapes then, is there, Jeff? Okay, think about the shareholders and how you're gonna explain to them at the next meeting why you had to install a frickin' Halon system when nothing is ever gonna go up in flames down there. Do you know how expensive that is?'

 

I have a feeling an Accountant is involved somewhere in the smoke

 

11 years of cover up? The cultural loss is bad enough.

 

I'm sticking with Frank Zappa's take on humanity " Yes, people, we are dumb all over, and maybe even a little ugly on the side".

 

I don't think accountants have a balance sheet term for "Cultural Loss"

 

`
One good thing about recording digitally is that massive amounts of information can be stored on relatively small devices.

I make it a point to create multiple copies of everything I consider important and store them on separate thumb drives. While this doesn't guarantee that a disaster can't happen (since all these devices end up at my house at the end of the day), at least it makes it a little harder to lose everything at one time.

As far as Universal Studios is concerned... I blame "complacency"...


`

 

At this point, all of my music is digital, our family photos are all digital, family videos are all digital, etc. My server has a backup routine that runs every night and backs up all of my data to a USB hard drive. I have two of them, one of them I keep in my desk at work. I swap them out every few months so in the case of a disaster, I lose at most a few months of data. Far better than almost 20 years of data.

 

This assumes it's all digitized. I agree though...redundancy is king when it comes to backups of important data.

Hearing of the loss of historical recordings like this is really sickening .

 

Check their B list of musicians/ groups. Somebody has prioritized the artists in strange way.

 

Cheryl Crow has lost all of her catalog as well.

 

Well, every cloud has a silver lining.h

 

There probably are clones and copies but...the masters...the first generation is the Big Dog.

I have tape that is 60 years old that plays fine. I have ten year old CDR's and DVD's that don't. And don't get me started on DAT and 1630.

Those original masters are priceless.