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The result was an optical disk and computer-based system called " the Digital Domesday Book" (no, not doomsday!) which sought to grab a snapshot of Britain at that moment in history.

This project included maps, video, over 200,000 still pictures and a raft of other data that was committed to digital media and made accessible by software which ran on the BBC microcomputer of the day.

Of course the format of that optical media has long since fallen into obscurity and the results of an attempt to recover that data remains unclear.

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This raises the thorny issue of just how do we store digital data for long-term purposes?

I know that until very recently, I still had a shelf full of 8" floppy disks filled with data.

Of course, since I retired my last 8" floppy drive about 20 years ago, I had no way of reading this data and chances are that the contents had long ago succumbed to "digital rot" anyway.

Floppy drives changed a lot in the 1980s, eventually settling on the 1.44MB 3.5" version to which many backups and much data was committed.

Unfortunately, it's been my experience that data written to these disks deteriorated at a rate which was several times that encountered on the larger, older, less-densely packed disks of a decade earlier. What's more, the humble floppy drive is becoming a very rare beast, most manufacturers opting for a CD or DVD drive instead.

So where does that leave us if we have some valuable data that we want to archive for posterity?

Well you could simply write it to high-quality CDR or DVD disks and also carefully store away an entire PC with matching drives -- in the hope that when you need to recover the data, everything will still be working.

I wouldn't bank on that strategy though -- since the actual life of modern recordable optical media seems something that has yet to be established -- although your average "bulk-buy" CDR can show significant data loss after just a few months in some cases. Electronic equipment also has an annoying habit of failing on startup if it's been stored for extended periods without use.

You could dump your data to one of the (still) relatively common tape formats -- but tape has its own set of problems (bleed-through, stretch, etc) that could also render your data irretrievable.

Perhaps the safest way however, would be to print the damned stuff out onto good old paper and then file it away in a shoe-box in the wardrobe.

Sometimes the oldest ways are still the best.

Or do you have a better idea?

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