Comments on: Digital Archive Reliability http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/itanswers/digital-archive-reliability/ Sat, 18 May 2013 07:52:31 +0000 hourly 1 By: sunsetrider http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/itanswers/digital-archive-reliability/#comment-101517 sunsetrider Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:58:06 +0000 #comment-101517 A few years ago, I was involved in a project which converted ‘reel’ tapes to cartridge tapes. We processed over 1500 units (some of which had not been accessed in 15+ years) and discovered that about 85% were readable. The ‘unreadable’ data was basically lost.

I would recommend that every 10 years, all archived data should be re-created onto the current media of choice, to ensure readability as well as non-obsolesence.

Part of the rational for converting the ‘reel’ tapes was that the data was encoded using tape hardware compression/encription, and the manufacturer no longer produced the tape drives. It was very difficut to locate and use these devices.

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