RE: Archiving - In general

["Shaw, David" <dshaw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Earl [mailto:johnearl@400security.com]
> 
> Bob,
> 
> Bob Larkin wrote:
> > 
> > We have 2 Plasmon 1800 jukeboxes with 110 12 Gig platters 
> in each, and 2 Plasmon
> > rapid changers, with 12 12Gig platters in each. these were 
> manufactured by
> > Cygnet, who was later purchased by Plasmon.
> > 
> > Anyway, the Plasmon has 12 inch optical platters with 5.6G, 
> 12G, and 30G.
> > capacity. the published longevity of the the 12 and 30 Gig 
> platters is 100 years
> > for reading and 30 years for writing.
> 
> But the question remains, in 100 years will you have the hardware
> capable of reading this (well preserved!) media?

Flip answer: That won't be MY problem! <grin>

Thoughtful answer: Speculation that far into the future is pretty much a
guessing game, however I submit that for any given storage medium, the
availability of mechanisms for reading it will be determined by the quantity
and value of the information stored on that medium.  I suspect that it will
be hard to find readers for Bob's 12-inch optical platters unless their
market penetration increases very dramatically (not likely, IMHO, as they're
too big).  Readers for standard size CD's, however, are likely to be
available for a very long time due to their ubiquity.  Their most likely
successors, DVD's, are so similar that DVD readers are commonly manufactured
with the ability to read both the DVD and the CD format.  Certainly in the
10-year timeframe it seems very unlikely that CD readers will become rare,
certainly no rarer than the ability to read 5 1/4 inch diskettes is today (I
would be very much surprised if anyone on this list would require more than
a day to find a machine capable of reading a 5 1/4, even now).  Even if a
mainstream format did die off, I imagine that there would be a changeover
period when most of the valuable info would be able to be migrated from the
old format to whatever the popular one at the time might be.  Right now I
think CD's are about the safest thing there is, and indeed it's the most
popular choice for professional archivists, who ought to have a handle on
this stuff.

Dave Shaw
Spartan International, Inc.
Spartanburg, SC
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