I thought your article on archiving (PCW, January 2008) was very interesting. It gave a lot of useful information about how to get content into digital form and organise it as well as some information on physical storage mediums. However there are some really important points which weren't touched on at all.

Choose the file formats you use carefully, When you or your children want to view the content years from now, will the software and the machine to run it on be available? My own advice would be to choose file types that are simple and non-proprietary, like BMP for images, WAV for sound and TXT for text.

So that it's likely there will always be a reader available, if you don't do this you will have to keep an eye on what's going on in the IT world and reformat the data every so often, not a trivial act when we are likely to be talking about multiple gigabytes or even terabytes of data.

The same thing should be considered when choosing which piece of software to use to organise the data. If you have to migrate your data, the task is made much easier the database within the product is capable of being exported in a simple form - CSV being the most commonly accepted format.

Database corruption or loss is a real possibility over retention times the length of a person's life or beyond. Images and other items should be capable of being stored externally to the software so that the database contains only links, not embedded files.

If you choose to use a physical medium for your backups, such as DVD, beware the same obsolescence problems. One manufacturer of "archive grade" DVDs that I checked did not quote any figures for lifetime of media that I could find, even for this flagship product.

My own advice would be to use online services and let the data migration be their problem, not yours. As always use two services, not based in the same town as each other or as you.

Roland Bavington