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Editorial Type: Comment     Date: 09-2015    Views: 1281   




This issue includes a fascinating opinion piece from Arkivum's Nik Stanbridge which revisits a theme that we have covered in DM several times over the years that I've been at the helm - yet one that never seems to go away, nor be entirely resolved to anyone's satisfaction.

The topic is that of long term archival systems, and the potential issues that can - indeed almost certainly will - arise at some point in the future when it becomes necessary to recover data from an archive that was created on a platform that is no longer supported.

How can any business really plan for this? Clearly it is not practical for every organisation to keep a spare working piece of hardware 'in mothballs' for decades in order to be sure that records will always be accessible. How many of us still have 5.25inch floppy disks in a drawer somewhere, for instance? I'd be willing to bet it's more than will admit it. But what's the point if there are no drives that can read them? The alternative has so far been a never-ending cycle of platform refreshes that requires an organisation to migrate everything in its archive to a new platform on a regular basis. This is likely to be a recurring problem until someone comes up with a 'holy grail' archive solution - one that will remain readable into the future.

Nik's article mentions the much-vaunted M-Disc technology that may or may not prove to be such a salvation. But as he says in his piece: "There is no history of a digital medium being easy to read long after the technology that wrote it is no longer available (digital tech is simply too young). And because there's no history of this happening, I doubt anyone would be willing to take the risk of 'storing and forgetting' with this one."

It might appear then that the only true solution is one that doesn't require a high-tech medium to read it - like our old friend microfilm and fiche. But surely it is never going to be practical to convert all of our records management mountains back into unwieldy - albeit readable - physical film archives? And in any case, where would that leave the ever-growing volumes of digitally originated data, unstructured data, multimedia and social network records? No, film still has its use of course, but in a world that increasingly thinks in Zettabytes, we really will need an innovative technology solution - and one with genuine backward compatibility built in from the outset. Whoever solves this conundrum may have truly built the better mousetrap.

Dave Tyler
Editor
david.tyler@btc.co.uk

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