8 tips for raising data from the dead: retaining the original software and hardware used to create electronic date cannot guarantee its survival. Those who have neglected to properly convert and migrate their important information to ensure its availability will find solace and solutions in this article's suggestions for its recovery.

• Author: Kingsley, Lawrence
• Position: Report

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Despite the myriad problems that can beset records and information management (RIM), "all" is not necessarily lost when primary backups and data conversion duties are found to be wanting. So I discovered in an attempt to recover my own files from 20-30 years ago--a cautionary tale since the results were mixed. By very rough estimate, as explained in the chart on page 32, I was able to recover only an estimated 78% of the "ancient" archive.

Although this article arises from my trials and tribulations, it also speaks to issues facing society in general. It is well known that with digital records and documents now the norm, much of contemporary history will be lost to succeeding generations as standards change, computer products come and go, and storage media become corrupt. These issues have proliferated due to:

* Planned obsolescence

* Merger, acquisition, and failure of companies

* Improvements in operating systems

* Technological innovation

No one knows what the future will hold, but the past can be taken as a reasonable proxy of the compatibility and longevity problems likely to emerge in coming years. A convincing case cannot be made that backwards compatibility with previous generations of products is improving--except on the web, which is a relatively recent phenomenon.

How much of the past is prolog to the future will vary according to organization and job position, but the very nature of RIM is that a portion of the institutional and personal memory will always remain.

My journey back to the origin of widespread personal computer deployment in the early 1980s, when the archives I worked to recover began, instilled eight primary lessons.

Lesson 1: Think Software Obsolescence, Not Media Longevity

The tapes and 3.5-inch diskettes in this project were at the high end of the 20- to 30-year estimate of how long magnetic media remains reliable, according to the South Carolina Department of Archives & History "Electronic Records Management Guidelines for Digital Media." Other estimates of media longevity have ranged from three to 30 years and are too disparate to be trustworthy.

Use, manufacturing, and environmental factors (e.g., heat and humidity) are better predictors of media longevity than abstract rules, wrote Michael W. Gilbert in "Digital Media Life Expectancy and Care," produced by the University of Massachusetts.

But, since software obsolescence can be expected to outpace the most parsimonious estimates of media longevity, migration and conversion considerations should prevent "bit rot," or data decay, from ever growing; software needed to read legacy data will change much sooner than storage media degrades.

On the other hand, waiting too long to start the conversion process can exceed the media's life expectancy. In my case, 5.25 inch diskettes succumbed to this failing and, yielding hardly any data, were the most corrupted of all the media. A double failing was the misapprehension that the same material was available on tape, as few tapes survived.

Lesson 2: Expect Troublesome Version Issues

Had the material been encoded with standardized generalized markup language (SGML) to make structure and contents (e.g., paragraphs and sections) identifiable regardless of their format, recovery would have been...