Hi-MD for Music Archiving

[podmed2]

Hello Fellow MDs:

I have been using MD since the 80's and still use the format for my music needs. I suffered a HD crash of my personal MP3 backups, almost 1TB. Since that sad day, I have been re-acquiring music, and using 2 external HD's for backup. Considering HD's eventually fail, I am now using Hi-MD to keep another "backup" of music. I still have some old Sony 74min discs, and they always work.

I use a 80G iPod in my office which plays all day long - and eventually know that it will die and be a paperweight.

Its a good feeling knowing that I can have my music library on 50 HI-MD's, and that they will be around for my kids and grandkids (retro). IOW - when I am sitting in my nursing home days, I want to be listening to Pearl Jam on my MD player...

Has anyone experienced any MD failure for storage of ATRAC/MP3 files? I know if a recorder errors out during a TOC writing process, you are screwed, but under normal circumstances, it seems the MO medium is very hardy.

I look forward to your replies.

David in Virginia

[Karl Myer]

podmed2, I can tell you my experience. I am currently backing up my 1993 through 2001 MiniDiscs onto DVD-RAM's, mainly following advice given in these Forums. It has been a long process with a steep learning curve.

I acquired an MD capable of uploading legacy MD's to PC (Sony MZ-RH1) three months ago, and it is only in the past couple weeks I emerged from the sweat / many tears phase into the dawn of possible success. Numerous times I was at a dead end / precipice with no way to go forward. Then, some piece of advice would appear in this Forum, or, thinking hard, some insight came, allowing continued progress.

What impressed me, through it all, is the stable, trouble-free nature of MD --both recorders and discs -- compared with CD-R, CD-RW and DVD-RAM. MD has been simply flawless, and my original MD's are much older than my oldest CD-R's.

I don't know enough yet to give advice, so don't be overly influenced by these thoughts. There's still a lot I don't know, and my problems may have stemmed from my own lack of common sense.

If I back up a second time, though, (another thing I learned here: back up more than one place, time, and on more than one medium) I am considering backing up to MD. I think it was "wizard of oz" on this Forum who first gave me the idea. The robustness of MD will tide us over until a future perfect archiving medium appears, whether MD continues to be manufactured or not.

[A440]

What impressed me, through it all, is the stable, trouble-free nature of MD --both recorders and discs -- compared with CD-R, CD-RW and DVD-RAM. MD has been simply flawless

Until about a week ago, I might have agreed with you. But that was when, as I had a working, well-kept unit in Pause and was setting it to manual levels, suddenly it flashed Record Error and trashed the whole disc.

There's nearly 1GB of irreplaceable recordings on that disc, and Windows Explorer shows, and will copy, all the data except one 320 KB TRCKID file that must be a table of contents or encryption. Windows can't even copy that defective file. I copied all the other files onto a newly initialized blank disc, hoping the unit might rewrite a new TOC, and the copied disc didn't give me Audio File Error. But the player doesn't know those are audio files any more: NO TRACK. It's just garbage data.

The file system on Hi-MD is idiotic--everything in one giant file that's vulnerable to the slightest glitch in any other file, and with absolutely no way to fix those glitches because of Sony's encryption. Shouldn't I be able to just regenerate that little TRCKID file? Sony doesn't think so.

So: MD as data storage? Maybe. But MD as music storage in MD formats? Definitely at your own risk. And sooner or later, when there are no Hi-MD units left to use as readers, all that well-kept data will be useless too.

Edited May 4, 2007 by A440

[Strungup]

Hello Fellow MDs:

I have been using MD since the 80's and still use the format for my music needs. I suffered a HD crash of my personal MP3 backups, almost 1TB. Since that sad day, I have been re-acquiring music, and using 2 external HD's for backup. Considering HD's eventually fail, I am now using Hi-MD to keep another "backup" of music. I still have some old Sony 74min discs, and they always work.

I use a 80G iPod in my office which plays all day long - and eventually know that it will die and be a paperweight.

Its a good feeling knowing that I can have my music library on 50 HI-MD's, and that they will be around for my kids and grandkids (retro). IOW - when I am sitting in my nursing home days, I want to be listening to Pearl Jam on my MD player...

Has anyone experienced any MD failure for storage of ATRAC/MP3 files? I know if a recorder errors out during a TOC writing process, you are screwed, but under normal circumstances, it seems the MO medium is very hardy.

I look forward to your replies.

David in Virginia

#1 MD didnt exist in the 80's , the first one was intro to the US in 1992 ( I own it ) the SONY MZ-1

#2 I am Glad you love MD , You have been saved from aquiring G.A.S.

#3 Pearl Jam??????????, ,,,,,,No Rush , Dream Theater , Pink Floyd, Kansas, Boston, Bad Company, Yes, Amos Lee, Molly Hatchet , GFR, CSN,or AlanParsonsProject, Jethro Tull, Rainbow, Or the plethora of other Music........ Good music, that was before the MD and deserves to be preserved?

#4 What part of VA?

[raintheory]

FWIW, standard MD is a bit more reliable in the sense that if something happens and the disc gets erased, you can still access the audio data via TOC cloning.

regards,

Another MZ-1 owner, aquired in '93.

in Maryland though. ( Hmm... Maryland = MD.. a coincidence? I think not! )

-Aaron

Edited May 16, 2007 by raintheory

[alexis]

Well, I think (must still properly re-test it) that backing up a complete set of files from an Hi-MD to any medium and restoring it back at a later time works, "works" meaning that the result is a working Hi-MD holding exactly the same data as at the time it was backed up. No problem with encryption seeds or so. However it works only if you restore the data onto THE VERY SAME PHYSICAL MEDIUM (disk) and DO NOT FORMAT THE DISK in the meantime. Looks like some encryption information is stored at a place that only the Minidisc device can access and is used to check if somebody tampered with the Hi-MD audio files.

Thus a possible way to "almost safely" backup music on MD would be to use Hi-MD formatting and back up their content onto another media (hard disk, or why not other MDs in data mode?). It would provide security against trashed Hi-MD recordings, but if the TOC is damaged or the MD is re-formatted, everything is lost (i.e. not even SonicStage can recover music from the original files).

This post is to take with care however, as everything stated here should be carefully tested (especially resistence against System-File-Write crash).

But as already mentioned in previous posts somewhere else, I would not really recommend Minidisk for archiving, mostly due to the rarity of hardware (what if one day your MD/Hi-MD player dies?) and closeness of the software (Sonistage only/very picky about encryption). Furthermore, backup has to be done using the highest quality level (using lossless compression or very-high quality lossy compression), which is very space-consuming. A full backup of a large music collection would take a big number of MDs or Hi-MDs, which is (very) expensive.

Furthermore, there is still the option of regular (non music) magneto-optical disks. They are inexpensive (if old) and compatible with just anything, and are available (eBay) in sizes from 230 MB up to several GB). Data can be stored on them with the same level of durability as prized MDs, and they can be accessed by any computer for any purposes.