Paper is still the most reliable method of long term storage.
Agreed, however!
My oldest lines go back over 600 years and due to the research done by my grandfather (which I inherited) and myself throughout virtually my entire life I have a huge physical archive of family history material.
In fact it is so large I would struggle to access it easily if it were not for computers.
My physical archive is split between two houses roughly 250 miles apart, one in Scotland one in England; since the advent of computers (first with the Commodore 64 then through PCs) this mass of material has been digitised allowing me access wherever I am.
Copies of my digital files are kept on external hard drives at both locations and each time I visit my other house I take an external hard drive carrying the latest copy of new material with me. This hard drive is left and the external hard drive kept at my house brought back with me.
At any one time I have two external hard drives carrying the total research up to date and one external hard drive carrying the records to the pervious research point.
In addition my search is also on the computers at both houses, meaning in the event of hard drive failure only the most recent research is lost.
All my original documents are kept in acid free sleeves but copies and duplicate certificates are kept in cheaper plastic sleeves. Some people wonder why my copy certificates are not kept in acid free sleeves it is simply due to them being readily available copies which can be replaced within a couple of days if need be.
To give some idea of the mass of material held I transported my microfilm/fiches to my house in Scotland about five years ago and the total weight came to just under 5 tons. I could not even contemplate how much the physical archive (paper & books) would weigh.
Digitisation allows me to transport all this material in an external hard drive weighing about the same as a bag of sugar.
Cheers
Guy
