Now I am not for a moment going to suggest that we all go to this level, for most of us it is completely and utterly impractical. Saying that however if what you produce is important enough you may consider a less risky approach to content preservation if part of your objective is retrieval and reproduction in say many years from now.

Even with my extensive IT background I cannot possibly know what the technology environment will be like at that point, but what I do know from experience is that I have to continue to do battle with constantly moving digital data forward and at the very least along with that process I also archive material in a form that is as technology independent as I can possibly make it without losing the context of the original creation.

Looking at recent developments I note SSD technology for example has many benefits however it still suffers from the longevity issue. I may be wrong but if my experience with USB memory is anything to go by, SSD's will surely fail when you least want or expect it, time as always will tell. Cloud storage again does not solve the longevity problem. It provides an off-site storage solution which gives you some more short term comfort but also comes with relying on others to maintain it for you. This is a huge problem for me personally because I cannot know how diligently the people I am relying on to maintain that data are going to be.

Cloud solutions also come with some measure of financial cost particularly for large data volumes and there can also be legal ownership issue as well, so check the fine print before diving in.

In summary, technology often advances in an almost self serving process, and it is usually in a commercially self serving process for the benefit of the vendors. Sometimes technology hinders rather than assists with your objectives. If it works for you then great. But if you find it's still not solving some fundamental problems in what you do, a look into the past can sometimes reveal the way forward for the future.

Jason Durbin (aka Lagrange Audio) has been a synth and music tech enthusiast for 30 years since getting his hands on his first synth in 1983 at the tender age of 16. He hasn't earned a single Aussie dollar from music but the journey has been nothing short of incredible and he has met and interacted with some amazing people along the way. Jason is a true enthusiast doing it for nothing more than the pure love of it.