Pundits reckon microfilm will last 500 years given the right storage conditions. New legislation certainly won`t require companies to retain their records for that long, and neither will customer service needs.
But even 50 years, which is less than the term insurance companies will likely keep customer documents, for example, is longer than the life expectancy of most technologies. Storage technologies range from solid-state disks to USB storage, various formats of magnetic tapes, popular optical media such as CD-R and CD-RW and the new DVD-based technologies, ubiquitous magnetic tapes, microfilm and paper.
But not for nothing is microfilm now known as reference archive media. Technology manufacturers claim that CD-R disc lifespan ranges from 50 to 200 years and CD-RW anywhere between 20 and 100 years. Magnetic tape life expectancy floats between 10 and 30 years and USB is prohibitive because of cost.
What the manufacturers don`t tell you is that while the media may last that long, the reader probably won`t. Home PCs and laptops today are sold with DVD readers and writers. They claim to be backward-compatible, which means they can read CDs. But they sometimes cannot write to them. CD writers are still available for purchase but for how long? And for how long will DVD readers continue to support the older, slower, less dense CD optical technology?
Reference archive media such as microfilm subsists on very low-level technology. It requires little imagination to see that it will continue to be supported well into the future as a common base one step above paper.
But while organisations seek the right storage media for their needs, they must first clearly understand those needs.
It starts with two simple questions: what information must I retain and for how long must I keep it? They must also factor in the authenticity requirement, retrieval rate and the need for reliability.
If documents must only be kept for five months, then reference archive media is clearly not the right solution. If the document must be kept for 50 years then which is more suitable: magnetic disk, optical disc, paper or reference archive media? Microfilm-stored documents have been run through the legal system. The courts accept their authenticity. Over a 50-year period, microfilm will most often be the best choice for organisations seeking to store great volumes of documents.
Long-term or short-term?
However, the issue is not so cut-and-dried when documents must be stored for 10 years, for example. Is that long-term or short-term? Organisations must also consider that in the 10-year period a number of software versions will be used to read stored information. That results in formatting and conversion problems, particularly for older documents.
The software and hardware changes often require data migration projects, and they can expect a 5% data loss during each one.
Paul Mullon, marketing director of Metrofile
The operating system will definitely change in a 10-year period, further complicating matters. The employees who created the storage environment and worked with the technologies will typically have moved on. Storage hardware closely follows Moore`s Law, so roughly every 18 months there will be a technology refresh. While that may sound trivial, the question of document authenticity is not a trivial matter for courts of law.
Related statistics don`t do anything to relieve the stress for storage executives. The software and hardware changes often require data migration projects, and they can expect a 5% data loss during each one. Given the number of times an organisation will undergo migration projects in a 10- or 20-year period, executives must ask themselves if they`re comfortable with that level of loss. It could be as high as half of the original data being partially corrupted. Most often the answer is no, but can you be certain that this is not the case in your organisation? Usually where there will be many cases where authenticity is critical, then companies will need to do something about the data corruption.
Issues surrounding migration projects are not only about data loss. There is the time taken to complete the project too.
If there are terabytes of data to work with, then the time taken to migrate is vast, particularly if some of the information is offline. Converting it to an online medium is expensive and time-consuming. This is where reference archive media really comes into its own. At the time of imaging, the documents are automatically written to a medium designed for long-term preservation that doesn`t need to go through a migration process, such as microfilm, and the issues fall away. It`s low-tech, but it doesn`t have obsolescence issues and even 50 years later it is a very simple process to read the image to print it to paper or write to the latest media technology.
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