I have a 100 year old copy of Dracula that is just as easy to read as the day it was printed. I don’t think Isaac Asimov’s, Harry Seldon (Foundation) could have foreseen the massive need for data storage required in modern industry.
Do you have important historical data stored on Floppy disks? 3.5 inch? 5 inch? 8 inch??? How about an aging stack of punch cards…in EBCDIC format (Precursor to ASCII)? If you think you may be hard pressed to find something that can read them now, imagine how hard it might be ten or twenty years from now. (Has anyone seen my 8-track player?)
Legal requirements for information can often have companies digging through yellowing, moldy paper documentation. That’s why the topic of long-term digital data preservation was discussed at the Storage Networking Industry Association’s “Storage Developers Conference” in Silicon Valley. The companies that attended were polled and 68 percent said they would need to maintain data for 100 years or longer.
This conference brought about the invention of SIRF (Self-contained Information Retention Format) which is now designed to be a new standard for data archives.
No information is available yet on the details of the SIRF format or what it looks like.
Via ZDnet
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