What steps can I take to help ensure my digital media will be preserved for the future?

What steps can I take to help ensure my digital media will be preserved for the future? I've heard that active management is a key to success, but what does this mean? My media's life can be affected by at least these issues:

1. Durability of media
2. How the media is used, handled, and stored
3. How likely will the media become obsolete

Given the above, what steps can I take to mitigate these risks?

WilliamKF

• future-proofing
• durabilty
• obsolescence

Comments

Answer by WilliamKF

The Digital Preservation U.S. government website has these suggestions of steps you can actively take:

• Have at least two separate copies of your content on separate media, more copies are better.

• Use different kinds of media (DVDs, CDs, portable hard drives, thumb drives or Internet storage); use reputable vendors and products.

• Store media copies in different locatiot are as physically far apart as practical.

• Label media properly and keep in secure locations (such as with important papers).

• Create new archival media copies at least every five years to avoid data loss.

Comments

• Courtney C. Mumma: Additionally, consider storing portable storage media (hard drives and thumb drives) and smaller devices (mounts, players/disk readers) in antistatic bags when not in use and handling them while wearing antistatic bracelets. For digital preservation professionals, these may be as important as the ubiquitous white glove is to traditional conservators.
• Nick Krabbenhoeft: In addition to these steps, you should ensure that you maintain the ability to read data from any media that you choose. If you chose to put everything on Zip disks in the 90s, it would have been difficult to migrate 5 years later because of media failure and lack of drives.

Answer by Dmitry Brant

In addition to the things already mentioned, you should take advantage of the recent emergence of cloud storage.

I'm fairly certain that cloud storage will become more and more prevalent. So, as you continue to make local backups on physical media, you can also upload your data to various cloud servers for an additional level of redundancy.

Comments