Computerworld Australia looks at “The 100-Year Archive Dilemma“.
While content may be king in theory, in practice, the media on which it’s stored and the software that stores it present problems. As digital tapes and optical discs pile higher and higher in the cavernous rooms of off-site archive providers, businesses are finding them increasingly expensive to maintain.
The software that created the data has limited backward compatibility, so newer versions of a program may not be able to read data stored under older versions.
Moreover, the media on which the data is stored degrade relatively quickly. “Ten years is pushing it as far as media permanence goes,” says Jansen.
Microsoft is not the answer
>>>”We want to avoid proprietary file formats to the extent it’s possible,” Jansen says.
>>>Jansen says he is considering using Microsoft’s Office 12 and its new XML-based file format as a standard archiving format in the future.
That’s an oxymoron.
When is XML not XML? When it’s Microsoft XML.
Jansen was also formerly employed at Microsoft’s Corporate Archives:
http://tinyurl.com/bc7wk
My advice to readers: don’t even think about using Microsoft formats for long term storage. Don’t trust Jansen.
You should be looking at OpenDocument:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument