Long Term Data Storage: Are We Getting Closer to a Solution?

Many scientific and socioeconomic reasons exist for the long term retention of scientific and lately also business data. To do so successfully, the solution must be affordable and also technologically flexible enough to survive the many technology changes during its useful life. This paper looks at the current status of available technology for long term data storage, more specific the standards that exist for data interchange, the creation and storage of metadata, data conversion problems and the reliability and suitability of digital storage media. Even if in the ideal for-mat, application and database management software is needed to store and retrieve the data. Typically the life expectancy of such software is much shorter than that of the storage media and as this has already been the cause of major data loss, possible solutions are investigated. Most research into long term data storage focus on large to very large databases. It is often forgotten that small, but very important pockets of scien-tific data exist on the computers of individual researchers or smaller institutions. As most of the time this is stored in application specific formats with a short lifespan, strategies for the preservation of smaller amounts of data are also looked at