Hi Robert:

I would push back on the bureaucracy some. Point out to those making decisions how much it has cost 
your organization to amass this digital archive and how penny-wise/pound-foolish it is for the IT 
department to be giving you grief. If your organization needs to hire an IT expert and have him as 
your interface with a larger IT bureaucracy, get the funding and do it. If this is some state 
government IT entity pushing on you, find some sympathetic politicians and get them to make a stink. 
Why are years-old car registrations any more important than your digital repository?  Hopefully your 
repository includes some sort of state legislature-specific audio -- I would use that as my hook in 
dealing with the politicians. They are a breed that generally cannot stand it if they think their 
"great words" will be lost to the dustbin of a cheapo IT department!

You might also want to get some funding to do some research. Find out what LOC is doing. And 
Smithsonian. And NPR. And the BBC. And the commercial networks. And other state historical 
societies. Then you can go to your political masters armed with facts -- here's the right way to do 
this and we need $XX to accomplish this -- and be able to give them a hard target to work toward on 
your behalf.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Wasserman, Robert A - WHS" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 2:44 PM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] Digital AUdio File Backups


In our planning over the last few years, we have always produced at
least one backup of every digital file we produced. At first, this was a
second gold CDR when we were only using a pro CDR burner for archiving.
Now with Pro Tools, we currently have the BWAV files on an external
Lacie hard drive, a server, and the server is backed up to tape.



We were recently told by IT here that we may lose our space on the
server and our hard drives are also getting full soon. So here are my
questions:



1: What good or bad experiences have people had with extracting digital
audio files from server backup tapes?



2: Assuming a digital audio file made it onto more than one backup tape
(stored in different locations) before being taken off a server, can we
trust these multiple backup tapes as our ONLY copies?



3: What is the guideline these days on digital audio file backups? Is
having 2 copies, one on a server, one that is backed up to tape enough?
Should we keep a gold CDR/DVDR even with the other 2 copies existing?



4:Now that people have been using gold CDR's for awhile now, has anyone
lost a file on a gold CDR due to scratches or other damage, and having a
backup CDR would have or did solve this file problem?



Thanks for your responses.









Robert Wasserman
[log in to unmask]
<blocked::mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Sound Archives Proj. Asst./Lead Tech.
Wisconsin Historical Society
608-264-6473