Ask A Zoom Rep

[Paul F]

I'm with Drift. I'm ruined for 2x copies during recording. Regardless of reliability, whether real or imagined, the confidence and comfort 2x recording brings to me is so worth it.

Even if everything goes ok, there is still risk. I hand one over at the end of the day. They preferably make a copy then and there and hand it back to me. But if they need to walk off with it, I have another copy if something goes wrong. Backups, backups, backups. You can never have too many.

[Noiz2]

Yes. I don't shoot much video I'm a sound guy. I also don't do a lot of production work, I mostly do SFX recording. Admittedly SFX work can be pretty hard on equipment so...
1/4" tape was pretty bulet proof, though there was a hunk of years when a bunch of companies used a coating on the back that could (and did) bond to the magnetic coating and just shred the tape. That usually took a bunch of time to happen so more of an archive/ sound library issue. And of course there were maintenance issues, especially with field recorders. MiniDisk had a bad habit of shutting down on low battery and not writing the directory on the way down toasting the whole disk. DAT would periodically eat a tape. You could usually manage to get the tape out with out breaking it but it was then kinked and you had to be really carful and only try to play it back on a decent studio deck or it would get eaten again at the same place because of the creases on the tape. Also some machines (I am looking at you HHB) would let you get past the end of the record part of the tape and then let you go into "record". Problem is that with out the continuous track the timing info was all out of whack and so everything you "recorded" you didn't. No way to recover any of it because all the DATs, including the one you recorded with, considered that "recording" blank tape. I had a NAGRA digitals hard drive shut down while recording because of low end vibrations caused by an F14 engine start up (it was really loud). I have had whole cards go bad and I have had corrupted files on cards. Not much you can do if the card goes but you can sometimes salvage a corrupted file or at least part of it. Cassette recorders were pretty bulet proof.

In a weird twist consumer stuff is often more bulet proof than pro gear. Probably because in the former they expect really stupid failures and the later expects you to know what you are doing. That DAT record issue I mentioned was never a problem with consumer DAT recorders. You could stick a tape in a sony Walkman DAT and record anywhere. That could cause it's own problems because if the tape was not recorded from the start a lot of pro decks would stop because the tape was "blank", so you would have to cue it up on the Walkman to get the studio deck to play the recording.

So back to your question. Anything that can fail will at some point do so. Use a card long enough and it will fail. There is a certain amount of wear and tear recording to the card and there is a certain amount of wear and tear moving the card and transferring etc. Cards, if you can find the spec., will have a rating for how many read write cycles they are rated for. It's a LOT but not infinite. And weird things like heat and "cosmic rays" (you think I'm kidding about that but at high altitudes computer memories are constantly doing battles with particles hitting and randomly flipping a bit hear and there), EMF etc. can all lead to failures.