Preservation of correspondence

Al Kossow wrote: Yes. I regularly ( == when I remember!) backup my email by throwing it all into a zip archive and then that gets written (along with other stuff) to CD, along with an MD5SUM file. I need to compress so that it all fits onto one CD; I wouldn't normally compress stuff that I'm archiving but since I spit it all to CD each month or so I'm hoping I won't ever lose it all (and some of it _is_ offsite). Not that anyone will ever care about my emails and letters ... I don't. But I _will_ when I come to read it. To be honest though I've never yet had a corrupt file read back from a CD. Either the CD was fine or only intact files could be read back (intact == the zip archive tested OK). The reason I always throw an MD5SUM file onto the CD is so that I can test it immediately on a different drive. I think almost all of my hadnful of early "dead" CDs were stillborn rather than cases of infant mortality. I don't know whether Blu-Ray (or HD-DVD, or whatever takes off next) will be any more reliable than DVD (or CD) but at least I'll be able to consolidate all of my existing data onto a handful of disks, so having multiple copies of stuff in different places will be much less painful. Although I remember thinking much the same about CD-R ("650MB? Noone will ever need that much storage ...") My main worry is that there will be NO successor to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD. If the entertainment industry decides to go for streamed content, then will the comuter industry be willing to fund the next generation format? What will we all do then? Antonio