Hot Diggety! Ward, Stuart was rumored to have written:
>
> In the very near future I will need to put together a software and hardware
> proposal for data retention  of approximately 50 years due to FDA
> regulations encompassing the medical industry.

Look at NASA. I've talked with various of their system administrators and
they have a *real* hard time restoring stuff (if at all) off old tapes from
the Voyager missions some 30-40 years ago.

Big limiting factors will be the ability for your organization to:

        a) keep several machines in an operational state from today onward
        b) keep software updated and working with the peripherals attached
           to them (tape drives, hard drives, etc)
        c) to maintain hardware support from the OS and HW vendor -- they
           just may go out of business in the next 50 years! Or they will most
           likely no longer produce the same hw/sw and refuse support for any
           problems.
        d) maintain recordkeeping of the formats that data is stored in on
           the tape. It may even get lost or burnt down, too.
        e) the physical media _will_ fall apart. There is nothing around today
           that is guaranteed to last 50 years. You *WILL* have to migrate
           data from older to newer technology every 5-10 years. Not even
           CDs are immune! Prelim research today from Kodak shows they may
           degrade within 7-10 years.
        f) documentation and training of people to run the systems *and*
           software
        g) 25 years down the road, your tape drive breaks. You (or your
           successor!) can't find a new part. What then?

How does the military handle this? Well, they put in explicit contract
guarantees that requires the successful bid vendor to continue to provide
devices, software, and support over the entire life of the product's use,
no matter if that spans decades. As such, IBM, Compaq (formerly DEC), etc.
usually has a small stockpile of reserve parts. But they do get exhausted
eventually, though. Not to mention the expertise. Tech support of today can
debug today's problems, but unlikely for problems of 5-10 years ago or even
earlier.

In short, I can tell you one thing: prepare to migrate data to new media
every few years. An advantage: technology will rise in terms of capacity
and lower in price per storage unit, so that will help, also.

-Dan Foster
IP Systems Engineering (IPSE)
IP Systems Engineering (IPSE)
Global Crossing Telecommunications
Internet: dsf AT gblx DOT net