>The Film based Imaging Association FbIA and others may argue that there is
>no alternative to microfilm for the
>long term storage of data e.g. 500 years eye readable as generally quoted.

Ok.  I'll crawl out from under my rock and weigh in on this one - seeing as
I've been vilified over the topic before.

Can film last 500 years?  Yes.  Is it likely to do so?  No.  Probably
everyone on this list has seen film that deteriorated.  The argument that
film is an analog source and better suited to long term 'preservation'
isn't without it's merits, but it's a red herring.

1.  Analog vs. Digital doesn't matter.  I know it's heresy to the pro-film
world, but the reality is that more information will be produced on digital
in 2004 than all the analog in recorded history.  The fact is that digital
is here to stay and that vast amounts of information of critical
information are stored only in a digital form.  If a nuclear bomb goes off
in NY, all of the financial records like bank accounts and mutual fund
holdings aren't going to be restored from an analog source - they are going
to be restored from digital back-ups of the databases.  Furthermore, if a
company did try to restore the insane amounts of information from analog,
it would take too long and pose additional challenges (e.g.,  run on the
banks).  The bottom line is that, as a society, we have committed to
digital data.  The issue is no longer whether digital is the right
media:  the question should be how to do we best manage and preserve the
digital information.

2.  Eye-Readable is a poor metric.  The idea of eye-readable isn't really
important unless we're talking about a return to middle ages where we are
assuming that we lose our digital technology.  If we really get to that
point, I would suggest that having a microfilm copy of your FileNET
software maintenance contract isn't all that important.  Digital use
technology isn't any different from the optical magnification technology
used to read a piece of film (oh wait, it is - digital technology has
advanced much more than optical magnification technology).  If you don't
have optical magnification technology you aren't going to be sitting around
squinting into the sun so you read the tiny little frame of film.  (Boy,
what a visual!)

3.  Media strategy is important - media itself is not.  CDs
deteriorate.  They delaminate.  They lose bits.  Sometimes they lose the
entire CD.  Like film, the deterioration process is slow until it reaches a
certain point and then the loss of data accelerates.  The smart thing to do
is to examine your media and *know* that you will have to convert from time
to time.  Even if the media survives, you have to factor in whether you
have hardware and software drivers to read the data.  (Quick show off
hands:  how many have a 5.25" drive on the computer they are using right
now?  No.  Ok, how many have a 3.5" floppy on the same machine?)  We
generally advise people to review their media, drives, data formats, and
software drivers every 5 years.  If the decision isn't made to upgrade at
that point, review every three years until the data is
converted.  Preservation or even long term storage does require planning as
a part of the media strategy.

4.  Film costs more in the long run.  Like it or not, cost is an important
consideration (if it wasn't, people would be storing the paper records -
not film - in fire proof, hermetically-sealed vaults).  The difference in
costs for film vs. digital is pretty substantial.  So substantial that the
interest on the difference in capital easily pays for the inevitable media
conversions.

The bottom line is that there is no reasonable economic or scientific
reason to produce new film today.  Demonstrations such as putting video on
film just strike me as hilarious:  who thinks it's a novel idea to put
analog video on film?  Thomas Edison?  Going to put digital video on
film?  Then we are back to the same issues with file formats and being able
to decipher and play it back:  all with a cost of more than 50x what it
would have been to store digitally in the first place.

Crawling back under my rock.

-Dan

Dan Elam
eVisory Consulting

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