Preservica has introduced a catchy campaign warning people against letting their files become “eX-files.” It includes a downloadable PDF, “Safeguarding your Vital Long-term Electronics Records.” (You have to provide your email address to download it, and you may have to turn off ad blocking temporarily to see the form where you do that.)
(Full disclosure: Preservica has recently opened an office in Boston, and this is professionally interesting to me. If you can help out in contacting its local tech people, I’d appreciate it.)
The document addresses business preservation, which the academic side of the digital preservation world often neglects. Digital preservation in business provides challenges because it requires protection of proprietary information at the same time. Not that this is unknown in academia, where confidential information and privacy of personal records can be important, but it’s a much bigger part of business information. The paper talks about applying the OAIS and TDR models to business records.
It’s often hard to persuade managers of the need for backup, let alone a preservation strategy, but the article points out that long-term record retention is increasingly a legal obligation.
Mad File Format Science 