How do you know that your archiving methods today will be enough to retrieve information tomorrow? Will the information you save today be readable in say ten or twenty years? What about encryption? Will your encryption keys be active should you need that data three software upgrades from now?

Logan G. Harbaugh writes a practical dos and don'ts blog about long-term archiving. He points out that media in just the past twenty years has changed enough to make it difficult or often impossible to retrieve old data. So how to overcome that? Clearly any upgrade or change in platform threatens your archived data, yet to hold on to old systems makes no practical sense. Read Harbaugh's blog entry for sensible ideas on how to prevent data loss.