CA Fire damages HP historical Documents

[EugeneNine]

(10-31-2017 08:17 AM)pier4r Wrote:  careful though. Digital data is great to make copies but it is hard to let it survive if one is not disciplined.

One needs backup on new hardware when the hardware change.
One needs to backup software that was able to read certain formats.
One needs to backup the OS that was able to run the software.
If needed, a backup of hardware parts to run the OS.

One should test the data every now and then to avoid data corruption.
Etc.

Time is long and everything can happen.

One solution is to stick with formats that are likely to be always supported, like plain text. Plain text plus markup language (documented) in another case.

Printing on paper or microfilm and making several copies in different locations would help alongside digital files.

I'm very careful to always use open formats and open source OS's as much as possible. Learned that lesson the hard way, never trust a company like microsoft to store your data.

I make sure I always have more than one system working such as my laptop, server, a couple raspberry pi's, phone, tablet. Then I run my own sync system (owncloud) so the primary data is copied to all those devices so should one die, get lost, stolen, etc I always have multiple up to date copies. Then secondary data on the main server and offline backups on more than one media type. Lastly file formats that can be read on anything such as opendocument or tiff.