Data Loss Events

Studio history is riddled with a number of catastrophes commonly referred to as data loss events, including hard disk failures and natural disasters, where the event is known, is believed, or was once believed to have caused the destruction of intellectual property. Below is a timeline of such events currently recognized by studio historians. You can click any entry in the timeline to read more about that event and any affected intellectual property.

Beginning early in studio history, blank tape media was a scarce resource. Whenever a new production was scheduled, if there were no blank tapes available, the production would first try to fit all of its footage into blank spaces on a tape with other productions. If that was not feasible, earlier productions that were previously dumped to another format, or that were subjectively deemed to have low artistic value, or that otherwise had low audience scores, would be "recorded over." The earliest known instance of "recording over" occurred during February 1993, when When There Were Monsters recorded over John Egan's audition footage.

During the production of the documentary 1994, Fourth of July!, the old camera was damaged by shockwaves from nearby firework displays. From that time forward, productions recorded using that camera and productions already on a tape where that camera was adding new footage were at continuous risk of unintentional recording over, because the camera might begin automatically rewinding and fast-forwarding while the record head was engaged. This threat was finally eliminated with the advent of the Ni-Ki-Oh! camera in 2002.

The Ni-Ki-Oh! camera used a different format in 8mm tape media, so for the first few months of its usage, blank media was also scarce. The technique of intentionally recording over footage was used numerous times; however, mostly it was done proactively, such as recording over documentary footage of earlier games in the Duel Monsters Tournament that did not decide the winner of that round, and recording over outtakes. Unfortunately, although methodical and well-intentioned, this variation on the technique still inadvertently recorded over footage that future analysis would show to contain conversations and other information of historical and narrative import. From that point onward, however, the studio generally ensured that blank media was always available, so for the life of the Ni-Ki-Oh! camera, recording over was rare and mostly unintentional.

In summer 2004, the studio added the new camera to its equipment roster. This camera recorded a different data format called Digital8, but used the same tape media format as the Ni-Ki-Oh! camera. Thus, a Digital8 tape from the new camera could be inserted into the Ni-Ki-Oh! camera, but the Ni-Ki-Oh! camera would be unable to read the footage, instead showing it to be blank. This issue came to a head in December 2005, when the new camera stopped working and only the Ni-Ki-Oh! camera could be used.

In September 2008, the studio began using the HD camera which did not use tape media, instead recording everything directly to a digital file. While it occasionally became necessary to free space on the drive onto which the camera recorded, this was done with utmost care, and it was no longer possible to record over footage in the same sense as before.

From the beginning, IT Manager John Phillips had impressed upon Ted and Nick Phillips the importance of backing up data. However, it was often difficult to perform backups prior to summer 2000, because the primary backup media available was 3.5" floppy disks, which could only hold 1.44 MB each, and the concept of using compressed archives or split archives was not well known. Still, backing up some files would require tens of floppy disks using this technique, and it was not uncommon to lose 1 disk in a set this large. Thus backing up data using floppy disks tended only to be used when data needed to be shared across multiple systems. It was also cost-prohibitive to use external hard drives for backup purposes, since most new drives at the time still provided less than 1 GB of storage space and cost hundreds of dollars each. The prohibitive costs also resulted in most important data being stored on a system drive rather than a separate data drive, leading data to be vulnerable to operating system corruption.

In summer 2000, in the aftermath of the Crash of 1999, Ted Phillips invested a significant portion of his savings to purchase a Cendyne CD writer for the studios. However, even though this provided a way to backup larger amounts of data, since CDs were write-once, most frequently-updated data was still infrequently backed up.

With lackluster data storage and backup policies and repeated events in 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2003, this has meant that most digital projects and other important data from before 2003 have not survived to this day.

Beginning in 2003, the studio systems were replaced with more reliable ones, and one with a CD drive capable of using re-writable disks. This led to more data being preserved. However, even the orders-of-magnitude larger 120 GB hard drive was quickly filled, leading to original source files often being deleted as projects were completed, in order to make room for new projects.

Around Christmas 2003, the studio replaced the CD writer with a DVD writer. In theory, this further increased the potential size of backups, but this writer was mostly used to package video releases and later to transfer large amounts of data from one system to another.

In summer 2005, the studio systems were redesigned again, this time separating system and data volumes, and increasing available space into the multiple TB range; thus, beginning in 2005, source data could be preserved indefinitely and much was thereafter resilient to operating system corruption. As a result, most data from 2005 and later is still extant today.