Future Proofing Your Data

Will your archives stand up to the advances of technology and still be accessible and/or readable in 20 years time?

Think Back over the last ten years and ask yourself what happened to those crucial documents that you had to preserve as a matter of commercial or legal necessity. Are they still accessible and readable? If they are, what has been the cost?

Of primary concern in this respect is the changing rate of technology. What is current today will be outdated within a year and obsolete within five years. But the long term integrity of your images and their future access need be nothing like the problem it once was.

In 1998, a survey by the Gartner Group (Digital Archives - Long Term Planning Assumptions) came up with the worrying thought that "digital migration" (i.e. one way of keeping data compatible with the latest hardware/software) overspent the budgeted allocation on average by 300-500%.

Rate of Technological change What we are looking at here is obsolescence, the shadow cast by the brilliance of innovation. Without the technology that created the digital record in the first place, the umbilical is severed leaving it a useless string of binary numbers. Even the absence of a single bit will render the entire contents of the document beyond redemption.

The path forward There are three ways in which digital images can be guaranteed a life here after: migration, emulation and integration.

Migration - reformatting the past At regular intervals (say every three to five years) all current and archived images are reformatted into the technology, along with all metadata and index information. The down side is that migration can suffer from being:

· Error prone - not all information migration is successful
· Labour intensive - with extensive quality control
· Costly - with costs capable of exceeding $0.22 per image.

Migration only defers the problem. Eventually, either the magnitude of the conversion or the rate of technological change overwhelms the process. Keeping data accessible is a problem that expands exponentially. At some stage you have to come to terms with a self-made monster!

Digital preservation…..is the ability to keep digital documents and files available for time periods that can transcend technological advances without alteration or loss of readability.