Rheine. Some 2.5 years after the data crash in the archive of his Metropoli cinema, owner and operator Heinz Schulte looks to the future with confidence. As reported, an unexpected computer crash occurred in June 2020, resulting in numerous data losses. Affected were tables of contents as well as numerous records/documentation and keyword directories for nearly 30,000 photographs with a total data volume of almost 30 TB. These included historical film documents with eyewitness interviews about the city of Rheine beginning in 1917, as well as 400 films with 12,0000 minutes of film about the development of our city. Large parts of the DeepL descriptions and inventory directories were lost at that time despite regular backups.
Unfortunately, even with the support of a specialist company, the data could not be recovered. From this point on, Heinz Schulte began the reconstruction, which amounted to a sisyphean task. In the meantime, with the help of his wife Karin and Jan Niehuesbernd, a senior at Euregio Gesamtschule, a former intern and an important supporter since then, he has succeeded in rebuilding the historical film archive about the town history Rheines.He was also supported by the city archive, which provided him with appropriate storage media and offered to store the data mirrored on these media in the magazine of the city archive and thus secure them.
In mid-November, Heinz Schulte and Jan Niehuesbernd proudly presented the film archive they had created to Mayor Peter Lüttmann, who had taken over the patronage of the Contemporary Witnesses project, and archivist Maik Angerhausen.
“I am very pleased that Heinz Schulte has not only succeeded in rebuilding a large part of his archive, but above all that he is making his life’s work available to us, so to speak. In this way, we are preserving important and valuable documents from contemporary history,” said Mayor Lüttmann.It was also important for Heinz Schulte to express his thanks in the direction of the administration and all supporters: “Since the founding of the Metropoli in 2001 and the Working Group Historical Film Documents in 2009, many volunteer supporters have worked in and on projects. And also the city of Rheine hassupported my or our workfrom the beginning.With the data now available in duplicate, a comparable loss of data should be ruled out for the future,” Heinz Schulte continues.