[Jonty30]

You would think they would have an archivist on site to ensure no data is ever lost.

[mairdie]

Remember great TV shows were taped over, too.

I had a collection of original 1” broadcast tapes from interviews with seminal IBM figures that I used for a documentary I was making. These were of great historical significance and when I took early retirement from IBM Research, I BEGGED the producer to save the tapes. But the tapes were big and cumbersome and I don’t know what happened to my 1” broadcast editing machines. Later I heard that the tapes were erased and taped over. I had been extremely careful to NOT make all the embarrassing stuff public and I’ll bet that fear of that, more than cost or bulk, let them disappear. All that’s left are the window dubs I took away and put up on my site, properly edited, of course. Really tragic.

[PghBaldy]

1890 US Census nearly completely burned, majority of silent movies lost, many US veterans’ records burned, hundreds if not thousands of US television tapes taped over...

1000 years of Irish records destroyed in 1920s,..

It is a common problem

[It Aint Easy]

To be fair, in my work and personal life, I often delete much that I think is of no value at the time. After the fact, I end up wanting to kick myself for deleting it.

Storage costs are insanely cheap today compared to the past, those magnetic tapes had much more pressure for reuse if the possible future archival value didn’t keep them hands-off. Magnetic backup tapes were destined for re-purpose after their holding period not so long ago, ask anyone in the server realm.

[BradyLS]

…And the necessary equipment to play them back and faithfully replicate them.

[Twotone]

In the short video, it was explained that the information wasn’t lost. It was recorded on other media. Also the television broadcasts still exist. They just over-wrote these particular tapes.

[GingisK]

You would think they would have an archivist on site to ensure no data is ever lost.

Apollo went unfunded. NASA doesn't put personnel on unfunded projects. Most archival work is done by volunteers. I know one man who did quite a lot of work saving Apollo records; but, it was very difficult for him to gain traction. A lot of material gets warehoused without any sort of catalogue.

[GingisK]

Here is a tidbit of information from the Apollo/Skylab days: All down-link data, including voice & video, was recorded at the tracking stations on 1-inch video tape as analog data. Those tapes were post-processed at JPL and Marshall in order to recover the voice, video, and digital data components. (Of course, these signals were used in real time in Mission Control.) There are very few operational 1" video tape machines left on this planet.

I worked for Sperry Rand at Marshall during the Skylab mission. My job related to recovering data from the digital sub-masters that were made from the analog masters. A UNIVAC 1108 was used to post-process the analog masters into digital sub-masters.

[KarlInOhio]

In the 1980s I worked for a DoD office the was the custodian of thousands of magnetic tapes of Vietnam war battle damage reports. After being stored badly in Vietnam, then back in the states and then finally in our office they turned out to be 100% unreadable. Maybe if someone did some hardware tweaking on a tape reader we might have gotten something to copy, but no one wanted to pay for it. We ended up having the tapes degaussed and destroyed to clear shelf space.

As the college intern, I spend a lot of time lugging tapes for that job.

[Bikkuri]

"on site to ensure no data is ever lost"

Kind of like the ballots that weren't supposed to be destroyed for 2 years (or something like that)?