<== Site Review (2009-03-08) ==>

Millenniata

Millenniata is start up firm in Springville working to produce a long lasting storage device that works with DVD and CD drives.

None of the popular storage media on the market serves well as archival medium. Millenniata claims that CDs have an estimated storage life of only about seven years. Magnetic tape has a life expectency of 30 years. Discs and solid state memory have an expected life of a decade.

I have had serious problems with writable CDs going bad, and I've blown out more than my fair share of hard drives.

It would be exciting to see a device come on the market with a sufficiently long life expectency to serve archival needs.

Until Then ...

If one cannot depend on the quality of medium for long term storage, then one needs to depend on process.

I am currently of the opinion that online backup and shared disk systems provide the best back up and long term archival solutions for families and small businesses. I like to have a copy of my archives on a local computer. I then back up the data to an offsite program like Mozy or xDrive.

These services secure the data in data centers with controls that are better than most business data centers.

BTW, if you have important data that you would like people to access a century from now (a family book, etc.) I would actually suggest having the work printed up in bound book format by a on demand publisher. A book printed on archival paper will last through the centuries.