Quote:
Originally Posted by psyang
Depending on how long term you are considering, the other factor is whether the storage interface will still be around when you do want to access the data. Floppies and zip disks were prevalent twenty years ago, but not so much now. Cloud storage like Amazon Glacier is safer in that sense, as long as the hosting company doesn't go belly-up. Hard to see interfaces like USB, firewire, or SATA going away anytime soon, but still something you'll want to revisit every few years.
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Proper data retention techniques would suggest that you need to manage your media lifecycle as well - in the case of floppies or zip drives, for example, there was a window of time where most people relying on those technologies had access to both the old media and a new media format.
File formats are another important consideration - many formats are documented and could be re-implemented on current systems, but many others are a black hole of information about specifications, and if you can't make sense of the file format or run a legacy app on a future system, you are a bit hooped.