Linda Tadic

I presented at a museum event on a panel on digital art preservation and I was talking about it there on the panel and that was the first time many people had heard about it.

I think that people aren't going to realize it's an issue until they try to buy hardware and they say, wait a minute, I can't buy it because it's not available or it's so expensive because the supply is so diminished.

Well, what most people do today is they just put it in the cloud, but then what they do is they'll put it on a variety of different cloud providers with the free storage, and then they lose track.

And the problem with family archives is when, what happens when the parents or whoever was responsible for it, they pass on, how will the next generations know where that data is?

The other thing is if they don't want to put it all up in the cloud is they can store it themselves.

They'd be putting on a hard drive.

Again, if you can't find hard drives, what are you going to do?

So if you're going to have hard drives, then make sure you have multiple copies, especially with that media, at least five copies, store them with different family members, but you still have to maintain them.

As you add to one drive, you have to copy those same files to the next drive, the second and third drive, and you have to migrate it into the future.

you know, to new storage media and check the files.

So it's really kind of complicated, which is why people just say, oh, I'll just put it in the cloud.

But then you have loss because you don't remember where it is.

And it's not really preservation, it's just storing it somewhere.

It's just storage.