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:
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 uzinv 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.
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:
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.
Have you ever accidently deleted an important file? Or had a storage device like a hard drive fail? Maybe you lost access to an important email account? Or maybe your created a digital file in a proprietary software that you no longer have access to?
These are all examples of data loss! Just because we can access our data in the present does not mean that we will be able to access it in the future!
Compact Disc from the Grace Cavalieri papers
Two floppy disks from the Kip Lornell and Charles Stephenson Washington Go-Go collection
Do you still have a CD drive on your personal computer? If so, you might be able to access files stored on CDs, but what about older media like floppy disks?