Strategic Info Management: Long-Term Storage

Posted by Howard Marks on September 8, 2006

Remember being a kid and worrying about that little incident with the stink bomb defiling your "permanent record"? At many educational institutions, permanent records, defined as those that have "continued administrative value," must be retained for at least 100 years. What stinks is being the grownup responsible for selecting media that will ensure this data remains retrievable.

In designing a data-archiving system, system architects have four main decisions to make: What to store, how long to store it, how to archive and index it so you can retrieve specific data when needed, and where to store the archive. Here we focus on the last problem. Whole forests have been sacrificed in the name of generating rules and regulations on what to store and for how long: We worked with one tobacco company whose legal department decreed that all tobacco-business-related documents are to be kept forever, figuring the truth can't be worse than failing to produce subpoenaed information. We've also dealt with companies whose legal eagles ordered all e-mail deleted after 30 days.

The Media

Sure, ink on acid-free paper and microforms (microfilm and microfiche) have a history of long-term stability and readability. But they're bulky and time-consuming to access, so your focus should be on digital mediums. You have five main options for storing digital data for long periods: