subject: Storing Your Data Safely [print this page] Storing information electronically has a lot of attached benefits but it also has some attached downsides.
Digital asset management has made it much easier to revise information, as well as drastically cutting back on the amount of space that traditional storage required. Hundreds and hundreds of documents can be stored in the space of a USB stick no bigger than your finger.
However, it requires an active approach - one fundamentally different to that used for more traditional formats. You can't just leave a hard drive in a drawer for sixty years; you have to take an active approach to managing your digital assets. Luckily, using electronic media makes it a very simple task to replicate data; possibly the best aspect of digital asset storage is how easy it is to create duplicates of data and store it across several systems.
Traditional archives have always been vulnerable to accident or catastrophe and if stored in a single place, so is digital media. Because you can simply copy a file and place it on to a different system, you can have several copies stored across several locations: then the only challenge becomes keeping the different copies up to date.
Once you've replicated the data, then your job is keeping each copy refreshed (keeping it up to date with other copies of the same file) and migrating it to new formats if you change your systems, or just to keep up to date with new software releases (from .doc to .pdf for example). All of this is made much easier thanks to metadata - information attached to the file such as date of creation, the original author, revision and preservation history, rights management and more.
As you can imagine, this proves extremely useful for preserving digital media - and crucially it also helps in retrieval and cataloguing of digital media. You can index files by various aspects of metadata - date, type, format, author, last accessed, etc - and retrieve them in seconds. Then if your system is capable, you can quickly download the file, burn it off to disc, email it to another location, or simply create a shortcut to the archived version so you can find it instantly next time you access the system.
Why is this needed? Because of:
Physical Deterioration:
It may come as some surprise but storing information on digital media doesn't actually provide a more durable format than analog media in itself. Although everyone will be familiar with how paper deteriorates, if stored properly this only happens after about six decades - and once it begins, it only progresses slowly. Plus once it has started, you can still retrieve information.
With digital data, as soon as the deterioration starts then the chance data will be lost - you can read a yellowing piece of paper, you can't read a corrupted byte of data. Secondly, the magnetic tape used in almost all forms of digital storage (which may be replaced by solid state storage in the near future) degrades fairly rapidly once time and use starts to affect it.
Obsolescence
Even though physical deterioration can be a problem, the ease of replication has admittedly made it an easy challenge to overcome. In the long term, archived data can be made inaccessible to the general user thanks to the pace of development in digital technology. For an example, just consider the 3.5 inch floppy disk - once ubiquitous, now used rarely if ever.
The problem is even greater when you consider that hardware is just one component of digital storage; software and decoding technology is advancing at a similar if not faster rate - even if you use the same physical format, if your computer doesn't know how to read the data then it's lost to you. Using a system with an established format for file storage and ensuring that all archived data is migrated to new software and hardware formats is a vital part of digital asset management.
