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Electronic records have not been around long enough to make educated guesses about how long they will survive. We do know that co mputer hardware, software and media are on an ever accelerating pathway of change and replacement. No one can place confidence in future predictions past 10 years. Even if we assume that the information on a DVD will survive for 30 years, most likely there will be no hardware or software available to view this information. All hardware and media degrade with age.
There have been numerous accelerated shelf life studies performed on storage media by standards organizations such as National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). All studies show accelerated degradation of optical and magnetic media occurs with increasing temperature and humidity. The disk bearing in a hard drive wears out over continued usage. Most experts agree that tape is the best choice in storage media for long term preservation. However, even tapes must be refreshed every 2-5 years to counter aging and changes in hardware and software.
Finally there is the matter of software format. For years the format of choice was the TIFF image. This is gradually being replaced by pdf. There is a pdf archive standard that was developed and adopted by ISO. This is slowly being implemented but there is some resistance due to the limited functionality of this format.
If records must be kept in electronic format for most than 10 years, the best strategy is to plan for continuous migration. Metadata must also be captured, preserved and migrated along with the record content.
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