I remember a DAT trader that I traded with years ago used to say 'Parallel backups - trade with as many people as you can, to ensure that your recordings will survive.'
In the early 90s, when Marantz came out with a pro CD recorder (for like $8-10,000) I thought that was going to be the future answer to my long-term archival needs. I bought an HHb CDR 800 in '98 for $1,800 (man how prices have come down) that is thankfully still running. Now that I am finally almost done transferring all my DAT recordings to CD, I'm realizing that CDRs don't last as long as the DATs will. Sigh.
I've been pondering the question of archival storage for a long time now. I don't have anything on my hard drive, except for 160 gigs of Apple Lossless files for my iPod Classic, which is used basically as an external drive for my Alpine car stereo.
I played around a little with XACT and tried FLACing some of my discs to try and get the hang of it, but it seems like it would take forever to do all of my shows.
Is there a preference to storing recordings as FLAC, opposed to AIFF files (on a larger hard drive?) Other than the size of the file, is there a reason that I should be storing them as FLAC? My computer is upstairs, and my stereo - DAT recorders - CD recorder is downstairs, so I can't really feasibly incorporate them all together.
Computers have always had kind of a high learning curve for me. That's why I'm much more comfortable with tape recorders. I still use DAT to master shows with.
It just scares me to read these posts about people losing a lot of their recordings because of optical disc failure as time goes by...