Most Digital Content Not Stable

brunes69 writes "The CBC is running an article profiling the problems with archiving digital data in New Brunswick's provincial archives. Quote from the story: 'I've had audio tape come into the archives, for example, that had been submerged in water in floods and the tape was so swollen it went off the reel, and yet we were able to recover that. We were able to take that off and dry it out and play it back. If a CD had one-tenth of one per cent of the damage on one of those reels, it wouldn't play, period. The whole thing would be corrupted'. Given the difficulties with preserving digital data, is it really the medium we should be using for archival purposes?"

Comments

Re:Multiple identical copies?

[t00le]

Any good backup strategy will have multiple media types, so CD/DVD should not be your primary backup media type. If you prefer to have an medium for fast access, then it is still viable. As long as it is not your primary media type, which should be something with tried-and-true longevity.