Photographer, Chris Frear, who runs his archival preservation
company Precious Voices  from Thornhill, Dumfriesshire is quoted in The Telegraph."We used to get around one or two cases a year, and now about 10% of all the work that is sent to us is mouldy. But sadly there is nothing we can do about it here.

"It has got to the stage that we open up all the packages of tapes we are sent in a separate room, away from our playing equipment and then we wash and disinfect our hands, because it is so contagious. If it got onto the tape heads in our machines, it would spread everywhere. It's almost like measles."

Nigel Bewley, head sound engineer at the British Library Sound Archive in London, said: "We use a quarantine room and send mouldy tape away to be sterilised first. The danger is that live spores could reach the rest of our collection."

No one is quite sure what causes the white taint on tapes, but it has been suggested that it is prevalent in Britain because of damp conditions. Internet skeptics are challenging these reports, saying it's not yet clear that it is caused by a single fungus.

It makes news because it reminds us all of the essential instability of all our media. We have tended to think, for the past few decades, that each technological development has given us more space for storage, and so was an improvement: Audio cassettes were smaller than vinyl, and unscratchable; videotapes were much easier to use, and less vulnerable to damage, than celluloid film was. A two-hour videotape was also much smaller than a two-hour film reel.

So everyone in the eighties and transferred all their old Super-8 home movies onto video cassettes. It was thought to give them some permanence, enter them into archives somehow, the way newspapers are shrunk into microfilm. But videotape has turned out to be highly impermanent. Now, videotapes must be transferred into a digital medium, put on a hard drive somehow (although we still can't agree on what format will become universal) - and not just because the tape medium is obsolete, but because tapes are actually dying.

Laser rot in DVDs
Think your movies are safe on DVDs? Think again: "Laser rot" can affect old CDs and DVDs. They are coated with an aluminum surface to make them more reflective; the aluminum can oxidise and degrade. "CD bronzing" is a form of this.  If a CD isn't playing well, and the playing surface is going brown, it has become irretrievably corroded. In fact, all digital media is prone to some kind of decay: Flash memory cards are also subject to a change in electrical charge that causes bits to disappear. (Right
Blue-ray laser rot Source:http://www.hdtvinfo.eu)

The problem of how to store all of human history forever has not been solved. Tape-mould is a symbol of essential impermanence of even the newest media. Librarians and archivists still agree that the most stable storage medium for information is ink on paper; you can even soak it with water and much of it will remain readable.

 It is also impervious to changes in "platform"; in other words, although printing and writing technology have changed dramatically over the centuries, a book printed using 16th-century technology can still be easily read by any user. And we don't have to find a 16th-century viewing-machine to see it through.

But ink and paper can't preserve moving images or sound. For that, we must rely on variations on treated plastic: chemical colours through which we shine a light; magnetic particles arrayed in a certain order; tiny pits impressed on a disc. It is perhaps fitting, even poetic, that moving images are more unstable than all others. It's hard to even define what we're trapping when we record sound: traces of invisible shock waves that cause their own shock waves when activated. It's philosophically weird, so not really surprising that it's volatile. Now, in online discussions of the tape-mould problem, the joking suggestion that we should start dumping all our sound recordings onto grooved vinyl discs. It's such a stable medium.

Sources:www.preciousvoices.co.uk
www.frearphoto.co.uk
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/