Personal Digital Preservation: Understand the Risks

Understand the Risks!

At-risk or Obsolete Media Types

Our files are stored on carriers or media designed to hold digital files. Examples of carriers or media include hard drives, flash storage devices (USB drives, solid state drives, and cell phones), compact discs, CDs and DVDs, and memory cards.

As technology advances, new types of storage media will overtake older methods. Over time, it may become more difficult to find and use technology required to access your files on obsolete carriers. Additionally, some media carriers have a limited lifespan and will begin to degrade over time.

Examples:

• Personal photographs on a cellphone that requires an obsolete or hard to find charging cable.
• Personal files on an IDE hard drive or early-generation solid state drive.

File Format Obselences

Our digital files are structured using file formats. Text documents are often PDFs or DOCX; images as JPG, PNG, or TIFF; and audio as MP3 or WAV files. These popular file formats are generally considered low-risk due to their widespread adaption and support. However, some of our personal digital files may be stored using other proprietary or at-risk file formats.

If many of your important files are stored using proprietary formats you may consider migration to more acceptable file formats. For more information and recommendations on file formats, Library of Congress has many resources.

Dependency on external parties or services

Many of our digital files are stored and managed in systems that we do not control. For example, you probably use an email provider to manage and store your emails. Or, you may use a cloud storage solution to manage copies of your digital photographs.

Dependency on third parties or services can pose a risk to our digital files. Risk factors include:

• Discontinuation of Services
  • External services may discontinue services that we rely on with little notice. If you are unaware or unable to react to the discontinuation you may lose your data.
• Lock-in
  • Once you trust an external service with your personal files/data it may become difficult to get your files back from them or migrate to a different provider.
• Security
  • If an external service experiences a data breach or other security breach you may experience data loss, or unauthroized access to your data.
• Changes in Terms of Services
  • A service provider can change their terms of services and pricing. This may impact how you can access your files.

Human Error

Accidents caused by human error are an obvious risk to our digital files. Common errors include accidental deletion of files and poor file management practices. One way to protect against such risks is to make sure you have multiple copies of your important files. This way, if you accidently lose or delete a file you can recover it from a backup copy.