As with the rapid advances we have seen in music technology, so it has been for digital storage technology. Rather than give you a summarised history though, I am pretty sure your storage journey is pretty much the same as everyone else's. Maybe you started with tape based systems, I certainly did. Very quickly you moved to 5.25in floppy then 3.5in floppy.

You may have even had the misfortune to deal with arguably the most pointless and unreliable floppy format of them all, the QD system. Then came 100MB ZIP disks followed by its bigger 1GB brother, then CD-R, DVD-R and now external HDD, SSD and finally, the Cloud.

The real question however is why did we move from one format to the other? The reasons are obvious, more storage, more speed and slowly you noticed as you upgraded your computers every couple of years storage devices started to drop off the radar. With each machine iteration you were presented with the never ending challenge of moving all your precious data from one format to the other. In the back of your mind however you were also driven by the fear that the medium that data was stored on and the mechanics required to extract it were increasingly fragile with the passage of time. Rather interestingly storage until recent times was incredibly expensive so most people could not even consider a backup or mirror of the archive, most people relied on perhaps one working copy on the computer and one archive copy externally.

However in this endless march of data migration and preservation we have arrived at an interesting point. Storage is now very cheap. So cheap in fact that if your data is important to you there are no excuses for not keeping multiple backups using whatever automated or manual process that works for you. But herein lies the rub. Both your storage journey to get here and what you do now is characterised by short term thinking. You migrated all your data over time in lots of short term hops driven by advancing technology, potential incompatibility and the fear that if left any longer you would lose the data on your previous format given its inherent fragility. Interestingly that situation still exists today.

My three separate backups of my own audio project data lulls me into a false sense of security. I have protection for the moment but it is reasonable to expect that the storage technology I currently use has a rather limited lifespan. All of those HDD's will fail sooner than I want them to. So cheap storage has not solved a fundamental problem, it has only given us some breathing room in the event that given sufficient backups I can still replace that drive or migrate to newer technology without short term data loss, technology which fundamentally does not solve the underlying problem i.e. longevity.

But what choices do we have particularly in a world where storage device vendors are entirely concerned with more storage and faster access. Even enterprise IT systems, the likes of which I am exposed to, are characterised by how much data they can store and how quickly that data can be accessed i.e the challenges of big data. What is rarely discussed in storage circles is how long can the data be preserved for on any particular medium.

Data longevity is not part of the industry dialogue and risk mitigation strategies are all about protecting what we do in the here and now using backups, archiving, mirrors, cloning, SAN's and multiple DC's and so on. A whole industry is built on it.