And let me chime in with another point or three :-)

I agree with Wanda and Scott, TSM will at least let you keep the media fresh
and recoverable. My experience is that you won't have an application that
can use the data! You either need a contract, signed in blood, that the
vendor of the product that generated/uses the data will support a 30-year
old format on as-yet undeveloped platforms -- or you need to make sure the
data is in as generic a format as possible. Flat, comma-delimited ASCII
comes to mind. Do not even *think* of archiving a database in database
format! (I've been on the wrong end of trying to get a Burroughs Forte/II
database off tape so it could be converted to IMS . . .)

Tom Kauffman
NIBCO, Inc