Q: Suggestions for long-term data/program storage policy?

A general comment. 

As usual, Brian is right on target. Indeed, this has been written,
conferenced, agonized, kvetched,  etc. about extensively in the computer
science community (and no doubt, among many others ... like accountants). I
seem to remember reading a Scientific American Magazine article (or was it
Science) about 10-15 years ago. As Brian says, it's not only application
versions, applications, OS's -- but even hardware that goes obsolete. Do you
have any data on 5 1/4" floppies from appications written for CP/M running
on an Intel 8080? Think of poor banks, drug companies -- or the census
bureau -- who have to keep their data forever. I sometimes wonder if all
these bits and bytes will fill up all the earth's storage eventually? :-)

Anyway, you might try researching this in the CS literature to see what the
strategy du jour is for this.

Cheers,

-- Bert Gunter
Genentech Non-Clinical Statistics
South San Francisco, CA

"The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning
process."  - George E. P. Box

Q: Suggestions for long-term data/program storage policy?

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