building a hundred year archive

I want to build a long lasting digital archive for my family's stories and memories. I'm not so ambitious as these guys; I only want the digital ephemera of my life to last 100 years, not 10,000. Still, it seems like a substantial undertaking with more than few unresolved issues, not the least of which is that if I'm really, really lucky, I'll have 50 years to work on the problem and do a little archive gardening. After that, it'll be someone else's gig.

The problems of digital media preservation are well documented in the digital library community, as well as by Long Now, Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive and others. Deteriorating physical media containing files in obsolete shapes, sizes and formats, written and readable only by applications that are long unsupported, runnable only on long dead hardware platforms sold by long ago disbanded companies; that about sums it up I guess.

Compared to the Library of Congress, I suppose my problem isn't too bad. After about four years of "being digital" I have fewer than 5,000 photos totalling ~2.5GB. Of course that's going to get a bit bigger, between all the little cameraphone pics and my new 6Mpixel Canon. Figuring 1000 photos a year at 4MB each for the next 50 years, I'll just be filling up one of those whizzy new 200GB disks by the time I'm through. Not so bad, until we throw in audio/video. I haven't put much of my digital video on disk yet, but I expect the day will come when all of those Hi-8 and mini-DV tapes are going to get sucked in. I have no idea how much data that will be, probably a real boatload. Throw in a bunch of music and other stuff just because I'm a digital packrat, and we're up to what, a terabyte? Right now that seems like a lot, but in less than ten years that will be a single consumer class disk drive. So raw storage capacity isn't going to be a problem, unless we start archiving our lives continuously.

Next up: devils among the details...