The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 2003 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. Information about the newsletter is available at http://www.eogn.com. [new domain - go there to get your own FREE subscription] I am often asked about long-term storage of digital data. Many people are worried about the expected lifetime of CD-ROM disks and other storage media. Others like to point out that we may not have the required hardware to read such data, outside of a few systems housed in museums. I will suggest that the expected lifetimes of the storage media are unimportant. As the previous article about the Domesday Book shows, a little planning easily sidesteps these concerns. The original BBC Domesday project stored its output on storage media that is rare only seventeen years later. Yet the conversion to modern data storage technologies was accomplished with little fanfare. In almost all cases, storage of electronic data rarely needs to exceed twenty years. In fact, ten years is probably good enough for planning purposes; twenty years probably is an extreme case. One major advantage of electronic data is that it can be copied time and time again with absolutely no loss of quality from the original imprint. Unlike printed books and magazines, a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of the original documents still looks as good as the original. If the storage media change, who cares? I originally stored my genealogy data on 8-inch floppy disks that held about 90 kilobytes of data. Do you remember those? Very few home computer users have ever seen 8-inch floppies. My genealogy data at that time didn't fill a single 90 kilobyte disk. Five and a quarter inch floppies became the standard of choice about 1980. I copied my data to the new, smaller floppies that contained 360 kilobytes of data. By 1990 or so, the three and a half inch floppies became predominant. Each stored up to 1.4 megabytes of data. I copied my data to three and a half inch floppies. By late in the twentieth century, CD-ROM began to dominate, each able to store about 600 megabytes of data. Again, I copied my data to CD-ROM. A few months ago I purchased a DVD-ROM writer that stores up to 4.7 gigabytes of data on a single disk. I haven't copied my data over to DVD yet, but I now have the capability to move my data to this latest storage medium. Even after more than twenty years' of research, I can only fill a tiny fraction of the 4.7 gigabytes available on each DVD disk. As I stated earlier, the expected lifetimes of the storage media are unimportant. A little planning easily sidesteps those concerns. In my case and in the case of almost everyone I know, data gets copied from old storage media to new every few years. The important thing is the plan to keep copying data to new media every few years. Not only is the physical media important, but so is the electronic format. My data on the 8-inch floppies was stored in both ASCII text and in DB2 format, the predominant database standard of the time. Luckily, ASCII is still quite common; but when was the last time you saw a program that could read DB2 data? The same issue may hold true in future years. If you store your data today in the internal format of some genealogy program or as a GEDCOM file or as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file, will there be software available 50 or 100 years from now to read it? Probably not. Instead, each time you copy the data to new storage medium, you also need to make sure that you are converting it to current software standards. You need to be proactive. You need to make sure you copy your data and convert its format every few years. If you are an active genealogist with a computer available, this will be easy. However, you also need to plan for the same conversions after you lose interest or after your death. Make sure you give copies of your data to someone else who cares, preferably a family member with a similar interest to yours. You might also donate copies to a family society, to local genealogy societies, or to other organizations who will keep an eye on it for you. I do not know of any national or international society that collects such data with the intention of preserving it and converting the data to new formats every few years. Obviously, the LDS Church and a number of commercial companies would like you to donate your data to them so that they can add it to their databases and store it for many years. Doing so will preserve your data for generations. However, you probably want to also preserve data on a more local scale.