Check out an interesting arcticle at CBC News pointing out how most digitial content today is not stable
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/new-brunswick/story/2007/03/19/nb-digitalrecords.html
In the article, those who maintain New Brunswick's provincial archives are concerned that much of the digital content produced today is not going to make it into the future.
The article points out how susceptible digital media is to damage whereas audio tape that had been submerged in floods was so swollen it went off the reel, but yet the data was recoverable. If a CD had one-tenth of one per cent of the damage on one of those reels, it wouldn't play, period. The whole thing would be corrupted and lost.
Archivists say the domestic digital formats available to the average consumer, such as standard CDs and DVDs, are not stable and were never intended to be used for long-term storage.
Archivists believe a safe and foolproof way to save digital material is right around the corner, but until then, it's up to everyone to do what they can to preserve their digital documents. They say that if you want to preserve your visual and audio memories, make copies of copies on digital, but always keep any analog originals.
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