Files that Last

The e-book for the digital preservation geek!

Computers are our long-term memory. We trust them to keep our business and personal records, but many things can go wrong. Drives crash, data centers burn, files get corrupted, context gets lost, software to read old files becomes unavailable, overenthusiastic housecleaning puts files into the landfill. If you want files that last, you need to know what you’re doing.

“Digital preservation” is a term known mostly to people in libraries and archivists. Do a web search on the subject, and you’ll find mostly pages about how big institutions do it. The mission of this book is to bring it to the broader geek world — the individual user and the system administrator.