zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Patrick Finnegan]

Vintage Computer Festival declared on Wednesday 18 May 2005 10:13 pm:
> > humans. 100 years from now I wouldn't expect to be able to read a
> > DVD-ROM, for comparison.) Most digital archivsts agree that the goal
> > is not 100 years, but 10-20 so that it can be transferred to the new
> > generation of media every so often.
>
> This is now a given to anyone that's given it a couple moment's
> thought.

I think that the best way to combat that problem is to keep a live 
archive on some sort of constantly-accessible (not off-line) medium, 
like spinning disks.  You will, of course, want to keep multiple copies, 
potentially not all on-line.

Keeping the data online helps with ensuring that the data is kept on 
accessible media - always copy the data off when you have to upgrade the 
medium to something new.  Storage can change a lot in 100 years, but 
it's unlikely to change significantly enough at any one point to prevent 
you from copying the data to then-current media.

Of course, make perodic backups/replicas of the data, and verify its 
integredy against the replicas/backups as well as using checksumming, 
such as md5 sums.

There's my $0.02 on the topic.

Pat
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