We have all lost stuff sometime to crashes whatever. But I can't back up my blog even though it is supposed to be possible. As far as I am concerned even family holiday photos are of value. I saw the only moving footage around of my Grandfather this year. It was shot 30 years ago. It blew my mind. I go to a lot of effort to back up stuff. But it costs a lot of thought, time and money. It needs to be made easier. BUT the most important issue is backward compatibility. Could you get information off a 3.5 inch floppy if you needed to? Probably not, yet that was the mainstay for information storage 'less than 10 years ago'. But even worse than that. Even if you could read it, would the data be intact. The storage issues with tapes, CD's, DVD's etc is shocking. Paper is still the best we have, see - http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform... It is an enormous problem and few see it for what it is. Solutions? There are few trustworthy solutions about. IMO For digital archivin - DC Crowley from FriendFeed MT Plugin

#3 reminds me that I need to get back into that pile of VHS and SVHS tapes that are the only remaining copies of some of my school projects. To me, the migration of data from format to format is the biggest challenge over the long haul. That's not just storage formats, but codex, compression schemes, etc... they're all important to keep migrating along. - Chip Childers from FriendFeed MT Plugin