is it likely drives are likely This is (I hope) the key. 5.25" floppies don't appear on mainstream PCs anymore. 8" floppies are still available (but there were IIRC more varieties than there were with 5.25"). 3.5" floppies are too small to last too much longer (although so far many of the attempted replacements - like the LS120 - are backwards compatible). I'll try not to mention 3" floppies (plus all the others I've never come across). I expect that CD drives will go the same way over the next five to ten years. Finding one twenty years from now will be somewht tricky. files (stored rescued/copied to newer Firstly you have to get them into a portable digital form. For many things that just means copying them off the old media and archiving onto current media (i.e. CD or MO or whatever you happen to like). For some stuff (boot disks, copy-protected disks etc.) you have to archive in some kind of image format that preserves the original characteristics. (ISTRC reading a paper about some US uni doing exactly this and inventing an archival format ... but I've lost the reference). Once you have made the initial digital backup your task is much simpler. It would take me a lot of time to archive all of my floppy disks (especially if I try to verify that I can accurately recreate the original media from the archive copy). But once I've done that, I can probably fit all of them onto a handful of CDs (I'm guessing that I can get 500 floppies at least onto a CD and I doubt that I have even a few thousand ... so call it five CDs to be safe). That might take months, perhaps years of copying and verifying (cataloguing might be nice too !). Once it is done I could run off a second set in a few hours. And a third, and a fourth ... We'll skip DVD ... not enough of a leap forward and too hamstrung by Hollywood fo rthe prices to drop quickly enough for my liking. Five to ten years from now, when recordable C3D is commonly available, I can repeat the process for all my CDs (which by then may number a few thousand). At 125GB per C3D I should be able to get at least 175 CDs per C3D, so that's maybe 10 C3Ds to archive absolutely every piece of digital data I will have then. Again, a second backup for safety will (hopefully) be quite quick. At each stage, I can verify digital backup copies against each other fairly easily (I'm assuming that data rates will go up as capacity goes up ... otherwise I see a bottleneck looming!) It all depends on how careful I am making the initial archival copy. as possible. compromise be made? Anything I care about now, I burn twice for myself. I always check the CD-Rs individually against the original source. interest in That's easy. You keep everything. Even the most expensive CD-R media is incredibly cheap compared to the prices three years ago. Obviously if you have terabytes of data this may not be so easy. But if you have terabytes of data it may still be easier to archive everything (which is likely to be a fairly mechanical process) rather than spend time sifting through deciding what to keep. files, but if everything some software the light of day, much cases, only the final OBJ and MAP files determine which "programs" were determine the questions suggest that the important as the I'm actually at the beginning of archiving some stuff at work right now. Copying the source directories (and the version control stuff) to CD in a PC-readable format is fairly straightforward. Same for the final listings, obj, exe etc. (although much of that could be recreated). The bit I think will be difficult for a historian to understand in a hundred years is how to build the product once you have re-created the environment. Archiving people's knowledge is not currently on the agenda ... it takes too much time. Antonio