Are Your Memories all Wrapped Up in Tape?
Act now to keep your audio/video memories safe.
Photo by author.
My dad passed away in that time before audio and video tape made home recordings a commonplace family heirloom. As far as I know there’s nothing of him in motion, even in silent 8mm home movie footage. And as much as I treasure the photos I have to remember him by, I’ve come to appreciate the power of motion and sound to spark special memories. I see it with my clients all the time.
As luck would have it, though, my dad was a professor of biology at Oregon State and a writer of academic papers and books. Conversation was his medium of choice so it was natural that he chose to dictate his thoughts for his secretary to transcribe and type. I remember standing in the hall outside his home study, hearing his voice as he recorded the words and punctuation on tiny cobalt blue plastic records.
In retirement, he decided to write a memoir and it followed that he would dictate that, too, finally documenting the wonderful stories he had often shared of his rural boyhood and career as a wildlife biologist.
His untimely death cut that project short, however, and all I have of that rich media is a pair of reel-to-reel tape conversions that my mom wisely commissioned before Dad’s dictaphone followed him to the great beyond. They lived in our fire safe for years, out of sight, until I was looking for some other old media there and thought to send them off for digitizing. Never had a reel-to-reel tape deck and never will. Why not have them digitized so I could enjoy them?
What I didn’t expect was that the tape had deteriorated and about 45 minutes of the 3 hour recording was unrecoverable. Lost. My only comfort was that those 50 year-old tapes had been copied again to 30 year old cassettes for convenience, and that those yielded decent enough recordings that I could hear my father’s comments in his own voice.
The point of all this is that I got lucky. There were plenty of ways that this could have gone bad and I’d have been left without the one snippet of my dad’s personality to enjoy.
Relics from the era of tape.
A few minutes of audio. The jumpy film of first steps. Video clips of Christmas morning around the tree. All those experiences that seem so trivial in the moment, but become priceless with time; they need attention to be preserved.
Audio and video tape deteriorates. CD’s and DVD’s become unreadable. I see it with clients all the time.
My takeaway is this.
Any tape or disk media that’s more than 10 years old . . . okay, let’s just say ANY taped or disk recording of ANYTHING you would miss needs to be digitized right now. Audio recordings, video tape, photos; anything we use to capture our life moments are really independent of the media they are stored on and like old fashioned storytelling they need to be passed on and revisited to stay alive.
Tape and CD/DVD recordings are not permanent media. They are just the flash drives and SD cards of yesteryear. Refresh and/or migrate your images, videos, and other important content every 10-15 years.
So THEN you mark your calendar for 10 years from now to refresh the files again and migrate them to whatever form is the new format of the day.
Photo management is a growing industry and you can find services everywhere to help you get old media digitized and preserved or find out how to do it yourself. This is the time to go through your drawers and boxes and storage units to find the old camcorder that Uncle Wilbur kept sticking in your face at family gatherings and turn his tapes into the treasures they are.