Storage Tip: Preserving information in perpetuity

by David Hill

October 9, 2007 —

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What seems to be the problem? Previous storage tips have discussed the need to preserve data for the long-term (a minimum of 10 to 15 years, but it's actually likely to be 50 to 100 years or more). A general solution does not yet exist, but there is a way to preserve carefully-selected and targeted documents for the long-term.

What do you need to know? iForem offers a digital archiving service where enterprises (or individuals) can store selected documents for what it says is perpetuity. (iForem recently briefed me as an analyst on its service.) How can iForem make what appears to be an outrageous claim?

To start, consider iForem's business model. While analysts do not like to describe anything as unique, iForem's business model seems to be unique. iForem charges a one-time upfront charge to store data forever. There are no annual renewal fees or any additional charges. Moreover, your data is kept in a trust so that the protection of your data continues even if iForem goes bankrupt.

Now of course iForem had to have a very sophisticated financial analysis done in order to determine what price it should charge. And that price is expensive -- $1 per megabyte. However, don't dismiss that price out of hand. Price must relate to value. With that price the selection of what documents to protect becomes very important. The company also provides volume discounts for larger vault needs.

Think carefully. Many critical documents such as word processing documents may be measured only in a few megabytes (one hopes!). So legal documents, such as wills or long-term contracts, key blueprints, and other high value documents may very well be able to justify the cost. Remember that this is for a long-term, remote digital vault service, not just raw storage. Also keep in mind that the service is not for everyday bulk data, such as production databases and ordinary e-mail, but only for carefully selected high-value documents.

Note that the files saved should be for common applications, such as word processing and spreadsheet applications, as the cost of preserving old versions of applications has be borne by iForem. "Heavy" applications such as enterprise resource planning systems, exotic (i.e., third-party niche) applications, and home-grown applications have too much overhead to support. iForem can only preserve standard commonly-used applications that it can spread the costs of preserving across multiple users.

Getting the documents to the digital vault should not be a problem once they have been selected because they can be sent over the Internet and by e-mail if necessary. The user has control as to whether or not he/she wants to be able to take data out of storage or whether a document will be preserved as it is for perpetuity (which is a process of putting the data into a "deep freeze"). (Naturally, someone will put documents into the "deep freeze" and later regret having done so, but that's life.)

What can you do about it? No long-term solutions to preserving a large amount of information are currently viable. However, specific solutions, such as the one offered by iForem, offer an option for preserving selected key documents where the value of the document far exceeds the cost of storing the information. You may want to consider such a solution if you have selected documents that really must be preserved for the long-term.

Mesabi Group