Long-term archiving of data carriers

When it comes to the long-term archiving of data on digital data carriers, there are a few basic rules to observe. We'll show you how to do it the safest way.
If you want to store perishable food for a long time, you must preserve it. If information is to be kept for a long time, it must also be preserved.

1. Data backup

Long-term archiving already begins with data backup. Think about where digital data is created everywhere. Almost all systems have the trick that you can no longer get them out completely. This effect is called "vendor login."

DMS

Make sure that you have access to all documents even without the document management system. Regularly use all available export interfaces.

Databases

Use regularly provided export features. Determine which important information cannot be exported. Create screenshots.

Cloud Services

With web applications, data backup is the most important. Check carefully what dependence you are going into. Proceed as with databases.

E-Mail

Every important e-mail with agreements, probative value or to fulfill proof obligations should also be stored as a PDF in the process.

Office documents

Don't just save Office documents in the respective format. Always create an additional PDF from the last processing status.

Other software

Almost every application creates its own file format. If your data is trapped in the system, please contact us. We'll get your data out of there!

2. Prepare data carriers

Use 2 external hard drives that you can always keep synchronous via an incremental backup. Check the new hard drives for possible manufacturing defects such as writing errors, reading errors, and faulty sectors. When formatting, use a format that is as universal as possible, such as ExFAT.

3. Convert file formats

The right formats for eternity:

Not every file format is suitable for long-term digital archiving. To keep your data safe, you should only use a few, particularly common formats. These will most likely still be supported by operating systems for many years to come.

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PDF/A (documents)
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TIFF (high-resolution images)
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JPEG (highly compressed images)
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MP3 (audio)
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MP4 (video)

Based on the quality of the original, all files must always be converted in the best possible quality! If you want to transfer your data to a digital magazine (digital long-term archiving for archives), we will be happy to help you prepare your files.

4. Structure archive

Use a greatly simplified directory structure. We recommend the following structure:

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Documents
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Images
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Video
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Audio
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Miscellaneous

Within each file type, structure as follows:

Year

Category

Subcategory

Operation / Event

Avoid umlauts such as ä, ü, ö and special characters. Avoid spaces or use the underscore "_"

5. Analogization

Do you have important documents that you need to keep forever?

We transform your digital data into a compact, handy book. Imagine: thousands of pages in the smallest of spaces! Thanks to the latest miniaturization technology, up to 28,000 DIN A4 pages fit into a practical box. With a normal scanner or even your smartphone, you can enlarge and read the content again at any time.

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6. Preserve data carriers

This ensures that important data and documents remain readable for many years to come:

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Put everything in one format: We ensure that all files have the same format (e.g. all images as JPG). This makes it much easier to migrate to a more modern format later!
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Create order: We save all files in folders so that they can be easily found later.
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Back up on paper: We print all important documents and images true to the original, but in a much smaller size.
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Store everything safely: We vacuum seal the data carriers and printouts in a special archival box so that they are reliably protected from moisture and damage.

7. Storage

Storing archives is a complex matter that goes far beyond simply storing boxes. Special knowledge and measures are required to ensure the long-term preservation of documents, photos, films and other valuable materials.

Stable environment

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Temperature: Ideally between 16 and 18 °C, constant temperatures are more important than extreme cold.
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Relative humidity: 50-55%. Fluctuations should be avoided.
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Light: Dark rooms protect against UV radiation and prevent colors from fading.
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Cleanliness: Dust and dirt can lead to contamination and damage.

Suitable materials:

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Storage containers: Acid-free materials such as cardboard, metal or plastic are preferable.
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Outer packaging: Acid-free paper or foil protect individual documents from mechanical damage.

Order and systematics:

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Labeling: Every archive item should be clearly labelled to facilitate access.
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Organization system: A logical organization system makes searching easier and avoids confusion

8. Migration

Digital data has a limited lifespan. USB sticks and hard drives can fail unexpectedly. To protect your valuable data, it’s crucial to back it up regularly and migrate it to new storage media. Additionally, ensure future accessibility by converting your files to compatible formats. Paper, however, offers a more enduring solution. Stored in a cool, dark environment, our archival-grade paper, certified to DIN ISO 9796, provides over 300 years of protection.

Archiving in change

History is what remains. In the past, people simply sorted out what they did not consider to be archival. If a historical event took plane, which temporarily did not read planned long-term archiving, historical researchers were dependent on analogous testimonies of the time. That is why the archive was always at the end of historiography. This changes fundamentally with the creation of digital time documents. Future history will be what should remain! Therefore, we may only create formats that are also suitable for long-term archiving. The archive is therefore already at the beginning of the life cycle of digital documents. For a manageable effort in the future migration of data carriers and file formats, the amount of different file formats should be as low as possible. The suitable formats are currently PDF/A, TIFF, JPEG, MP4 and MP3. A structure of file formats that is as homogeneous as possible simplifies long-term archiving.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Archiving digital data

Requirements for the long-term archive

Why digital archives are vulnerable (Video)

Data carriers for long-term archiving

Looking for a solution

Digital archiving is only truly secure in hybrid form

Which medium has proven to be effective for long-term archiving?

Characteristic properties of storage media

Specific properties of storage

Sensitivity to environmental influences

Data security

Availability and costs

Eigenschaften analoger Datenträger

Langzeitarchivierung von Daten auf Papier

archium Kontakt

Archiving digital data

In our daily work with a PC or MAC, we constantly generate new information. This information is then stored on the computer, a flash drive, or a hard drive in electronic documents. When creating these documents, many different file formats are used. To ensure long-term access to the information and metadata contained therein, the error-free interpretation of these objects must be guaranteed. The longer a digital document is to be stored, the greater the effort required to keep the storage medium readable.

Requirements for the long-term archive

While private individuals are primarily concerned with passing on digital photos to the next generation, companies, libraries, museums, and archives have special requirements for the long-term availability of documents. The requirements for long-term archives are correspondingly high. In addition, there are legal requirements to comply with retention periods, such as the retention obligation under §147 AO for the tax office. Accordingly, electronic documents must also be archived authentically, i.e., in an audit-proof manner.

Why digital archives are vulnerable

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While many archives have embraced fully digital archiving, this approach comes with substantial risks. Solely relying on digital technologies, which are constantly evolving, exposes your data to various threats. Hardware failures, software obsolescence, and cyberattacks can result in the loss of your valuable information. Our video delves into the complexities of long-term digital preservation and explores more resilient options to safeguard your data.

Data carriers for long-term archiving

Modern digital storage media are not suitable for long-term preservation. Electronic storage devices such as hard drives, CDs (Compact Disks), and DVDs (Digital Versatile Discs) have an average lifespan of less than 10 years. Beyond a storage period of 10 years, we already speak of long-term archiving. If legally required, users must ensure access to digital documents for up to 30 years. In this context, information technology is required to provide trustworthy data. The basis for trustworthy data is audit-proof long-term archives. Archiving digital documents, however, is challenging as the documents on the storage media must be regularly copied during migration. Otherwise, they will be lost completely sooner or later in the event of a storage system failure. One might think that long-term archiving for external, cloud-based storage solutions is guaranteed. This may be true for the automated migration of data on server hard drives. However, software adaptation does not take place. At archium, we recently tried to open files in Word 95 format with Office 365 - without success. The format is no longer supported! Supposed data carriers for digital long-term archiving, such as magnetic tapes (lifespan of 30 years) or the M-Disc (Millennial Disk, durability of 1,000 years), do not guarantee the long-term availability of hardware and software for the authentic interpretation of the archived file formats.

Looking for a solution

Interest groups such as NESTOR and authorities such as the BSI (Federal Office for Information Security) have been trying for many years to find reliable answers to the open questions of digital long-term archiving. They do valuable work to raise public awareness of this important issue. Certification with the Data Seal of Approval (DSA) may be nice today, but it does not guarantee protection against data loss in the future. As archived digital data ages, the process of maintaining readability, which cannot be avoided, becomes incalculably expensive.

To the Solution

Digital archiving is only truly secure in hybrid form

We address these uncertainties in long-term archiving with "Digital Definition". This workflow describes the transfer of digitally stored information to analog media, including the associated metadata of the documents. In archives of sensitive areas, analog microfilming has been the most secure form of long-term document archiving for decades. This includes, among others, power plants, building authorities, aircraft manufacturers, as well as banks and insurance companies. The combination of the "arTUX archive database" and the "armaGETON magazine book" on paper already guarantees future access to the information in the long-term archive.

Which medium has proven to be effective for long-term archiving?

Long-term archiving data carriers

The decisive criterion for permanent archiving is the planned durability of the information to be stored. Durability depends significantly on the lifespan of the storage media used. Concepts for long-term archiving must therefore also consider the probability of data loss over a reasonable period. Archiving electronic documents in business operations often requires not only a tax law retention obligation but also a data protection law deletion obligation. Storing data on hard drives, CDs, or DVDs is usually quite sufficient. External hard drives, which are not subjected to constant read and write cycles, store data for a period of 10 years quite reliably and can be completely and securely deleted without much effort. An external hard drive is particularly well suited for regular backups because mounting and unmounting can be reliably performed with the operating system via the computer's USB protocol. In addition, a physical separation between the origin of the data (PC or server) and the storage location of the data (office or archive) can be very easily established. However, USB sticks, CDs, DVDs, and hard drives have two major disadvantages:

The service life is crucial!

If the data carrier fails, all information is lost at once. This can quickly lead to huge data losses, as the following calculation shows: An average PDF document is about 200 kilobytes in size. A 1 terabyte hard drive can hold 5 million of these documents. A 5 TB hard drive can hold 25 million documents! None of the mentioned storage media reliably stores data for longer than 10 years. The limited lifespan of digital storage media and the risk of sudden, total data loss make hard drives and the like a very unsuitable means for long-term archiving. Even if the digital craze seems unstoppable, it is not the only option! Even in 2024, one does not have to do without proven analog, i.e., optical storage media. Many of you will still be familiar with the popular and at the same time hated microfilm. It was perfectly suited for the optical archiving of documents and images. Especially as a color film, it could store a large amount of information per image due to its high density range. Currently, it is only available in black and white, with all its disadvantages in handling. In particular, the elaborate treatment with developer chemicals after exposure and storage in climate chambers or specially air-conditioned rooms does not necessarily make microfilm the archivist's best friend. However, like all analog storage media, it is indispensable as a backup for digital data storage.

Are there practical alternatives to digital long-term archiving?

Below we present other options for archiving digital documents or photos without using external hard drives. The following table compares the properties of different data storage devices with regard to their suitability for long-term archiving.

Characteristic properties of storage media

	Paper	Ceramics	Microfilm	eStorage
Carrier material	paper according to DIN ISO 9706	hardened ceramic substrate	polyester	hard drive
Formats	210x297mm (DIN A4)	95x95mm 105x148mm (DIN A6)	105x148mm (micro fiche) 35mmx30m (roll film)	/
Durability	200 years	100.000 years	500 years	2-10 years
Used as a storage medium	2.000 years	12.000 years	150 years	30 years

Specific properties of storage

	Paper	Ceramics	Microfilm	eStorage
Maximum resolution	1.200 ppi	25.400 ppi	3.000 ppi	/
Capacity of data carrier	40 pages DIN A4	600 pages DIN A4	600 pages DIN A4	/
Volume per 10 million pages DIN A4	2,52 m3	0,01 m3	6,7 m3	1 m3 (server cabinet)
machine writable	yes	yes	yes	yes
colored storage	yes	no	no	no
Storage of color information	yes	yes	yes	yes
Gradation depth per color channel	8 bit	1 bit	8-12 bit	32 bit
Storage of metadata	yes	yes	yes	yes
Making it readable	optical magnification	electronic surface measurement	optical magnification	1. Functional data carrier 2. Data carrier reader 3. Reader driver 4. Operating system for reader driver 5. Hardware for operating system of the data carrier reader driver 6. Software for error-free interpretation of the data carrier content

Sensitivity to environmental influences

	Paper	Ceramics	Microfilm	eStorage
Temperature fluctuations	low	insensitive	high	very high
Humidity fluctuations	high	insensitive	high	very high
Fire resistance	no	yes	no	no
Water resistance	no	yes	no	no
Lightfast (UV radiation)	no	yes	no	yes
organic decomposition	yes	no	yes	no
Resistance to corrosive chemicals	no	yes	no	no
Radiation resistance	yes	yes	yes	no
Impulse resistance (EMP)	yes	yes	yes	no

Data security

	Paper	Ceramics	Microfilm	eStorage
Counterfeit security	high	extremely high	extremely high	low
Interpretability after damage	yes	yes	yes	no
Risk of data loss due to the passage of time	low	extremely low	low	extremely high
Data encryption through cybercrime	no	no	no	yes
Data theft through cybercrime	no	no	no	yes

Availability and costs

	Paper	Ceramics	Microfilm	eStorage
Storage requirements	low	very low	high	very high
Can the risk of data failure be calculated?	yes	yes	yes	no
Availability	immediately	from 2026	immediately	immediately
Total cost of obtaining information	low	moderate	moderate	extremely high
Data carriers available from archium	yes	no	no	yes

To ensure the long-term preservation of digitally stored information, it must be archived on an analog data carrier. The storage duration is thus solely dependent on the physical degradation of the medium itself and not on complex decryption technologies to restore the readability of documents for humans. In addition, analog data carriers are relatively resistant to spontaneous, total information loss.

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Properties of analog data storage devices

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high resistance to aging
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manageable handling effort
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authenticity of reproduction
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machine-readable
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human-readable
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readable even in case of power failure or blackout
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independent of technology for readability
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recognized for fulfilling proof obligations
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high forgery resistance
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gradual aging process
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possibility of interpretation in case of damage
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no digital encryption by Trojans
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no information theft in case of hacker attack
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no migration effort (time and money)
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no risk of spontaneous, total information loss
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calculable costs of long-term archiving
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climate-friendly due to energy-less storage
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proven for millennia and millions of times in archives worldwide for the preservation of cultural heritage

Unlock the power of long-term preservation with archium's Microsheets

Our innovative solution offers unmatched durability and efficiency, allowing you to store vast amounts of data in a compact space. Even high-resolution images can be safely preserved for centuries.

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archium GmbH, Gera

+49 365 855 038 25

kontakt@archium.org

​Long-term archiving of data carriers

​1. Data backup

DMS

​Databases

​Cloud Services

E-Mail

​Office documents

​Other software

​2. Prepare data carriers

​3. Convert file formats

​​The right formats for eternity:

​4. Structure archive

​5. Analogization

​​Do you have important documents that you need to keep forever?

​6. Preserve data carriers

​This ensures that important data and documents remain readable for many years to come:

7. Storage

​Stable environment

​​Suitable materials:

​​Order and systematics:

8. Migration

​Archiving in change

Inhaltsverzeichnis

​Archiving digital data

​Requirements for the long-term archive

​Why digital archives are vulnerable

​Data carriers for long-term archiving

​Looking for a solution

​Digital archiving is only truly secure in hybrid form

​Which medium has proven to be effective for long-term archiving?

​Long-term archiving data carriers

​The service life is crucial!

​Are there practical alternatives to digital long-term archiving?

​Characteristic properties of storage media

​​Specific properties of storage

​​Sensitivity to environmental influences

Data security

​Availability and costs

​Properties of analog data storage devices

​Unlock the power of long-term preservation with archium's Microsheets

Cookies & Privats​päre

Long-term archiving of data carriers

1. Data backup

Databases

Cloud Services

Office documents

Other software

2. Prepare data carriers

3. Convert file formats

The right formats for eternity:

4. Structure archive

5. Analogization

Do you have important documents that you need to keep forever?

6. Preserve data carriers

This ensures that important data and documents remain readable for many years to come:

Stable environment

Suitable materials:

Order and systematics:

Archiving in change

Archiving digital data

Requirements for the long-term archive

Why digital archives are vulnerable

Data carriers for long-term archiving

Looking for a solution

Digital archiving is only truly secure in hybrid form

Which medium has proven to be effective for long-term archiving?

Long-term archiving data carriers

The service life is crucial!

Are there practical alternatives to digital long-term archiving?

Characteristic properties of storage media

Specific properties of storage

Sensitivity to environmental influences

Availability and costs

Properties of analog data storage devices

Unlock the power of long-term preservation with archium's Microsheets

Cookies & Privatspäre