Ask Slashdot: Keeping Digital Media After Imaging?

New submitter rogue_archivist writes "I'm an archivist at a mid-sized university archives, trying to develop a policy for archiving computer files ('born-digital records' in archival parlance). Currently old floppy disks, CDs, and the occasional hard drive are added to our network storage. Then the physical media is separated from archival paper documents and placed into storage. My question for all you slashdotters out there is: should these disks be imaged and then the physical copies discarded? Is there any benefit for keeping around physical copies of storage media long since rendered obsolete?"

DVDs only live for 7 years

[elabs]

For born-analog content, always keep the original physical copy. You never know when you will need to rescan at a higher quality or when you will discover errors in your digital copy. DVDs are not born analog. In fact the only have a shelf life of around 7 years. You need to get everything off DVDs and make several digital copies of it. You should keep the DVDs as long as possible but eventually you will not be able to read them anymore. Make sure your digital copies of the DVDs are error-free because there will come a time when you cannot go back to the DVDs.

The contents, not the container

[innocent_white_lamb]

Your interest is in the contents, not the container. Therefore, once you have a known-good copy of the data, you're all set.

Remember to keep a few of the old tapes/drives/whatever for the museum display, of course.

In my archivist job

[Sparticus789]

I work on a team which does archiving. We have multiple layers of data storage. First, we keep all copies of media in a library. The media is imaged and stored on a SAN. The SAN is backed up to an off-site NAS. And once a year, we copy the data to hard drives and ship the drives to another site across the country. If you have the capability, put the originals in an archival storage area. I have never known a single archivist to get rid of anything, so you must be new to this community.

As an FYI, there is no such thing as obsolete media, as evidence by this project [loc.gov]. And trust me, you can usually find a way to image most old media formats.

if you don't care about the content

[gl4ss]

..or can check all of the content to be perfectly read, then yeah, sure, no loss in destroying the originals.

however.. if you have the space, why destroy? another issue is sw where you in theory might have to prove ownership of a legit copy or the originals might have some other curiosity value. another thing with paper records is that if you destroy the old ones, what was stopping you from introducing new data like a record for your uncles graduation from said university and with you having destroyed the paper records no way to go check them.

so my question is, is it really that expensive to store them, just for posterity's sake? even then you could just destroy them via sloppy storage rather than intentionally burning energy for destroying them..

Re:DVDs only live for 7 years

[PRMan]

Not this tired argument again. I have burned CDs from 1995 that still work perfectly fine. Sure, they "estimated" that they would only last 7 years. Guess they were wrong, since unless I can see physical scratches or other damage, 99% of my discs from my life still work perfectly. The only ones that didn't last and had no physical damage were a cheap brand I got where the dye turned cloudy, but that happened within the first 2 years.

Re:Image-Discard-and back-up the image

[doti]

image->backup->check image and backup->discard

Re:Is there any benefit?

[cusco]

As an archivist, I would think you might want to:

1) keep multiple copies of each type of media, preferably from different manufacturers, all written with identical data
2) Separately, a copy of the data contained on the media

Occasionally check the media to see at what rate their integrity is decaying. As readers for the media become increasingly difficult to encounter develop alternative methods to read the data, checking it against your reference copy. Eventually someone is going to appear on your doorstep with something like the Pioneer spacecraft data tapes or the Nixon Oval Office recordings, and if you can pull the data off it you'll be the hero of the day.