'd be interested in hearing of what other digital users are doing
because I know that I have a burgeoning collection of CD backups and the
thought of them 'expiring' fills me with cold horror.
It shouldn't scare you as much as the thought of film "expiring" either from natural aging or from damage as its handled. With film you have only one original. With digital you can have as many duplicate originals as you want. I don't think any digital medium should be considered an archival storage. You can pretty much plan on moving your archive to the next great storage medium every few years. With storage media ever decreasing in cost and increasing in efficiency, this is not as daunting a task as it may seem. I started in '93 archiving images on DAT. That's anything but a reliable archival medium yet I can still read those tapes today. I've not discarded the tapes but have moved all of the important material to DVD. That gives me four originals of each image...two still on tape, two on DVD. Difficult to do that with film. in the day that those '93/94 images were made, a one GB drive was a huge luxury and VERY costly. I can fit my entire archive from 93 and 94 onto one DVD with plenty of room to spare. It's not like a popular storage medium will disappear from the planet at the snap of a finger. You'll have plenty of warning as devices that read your favorite medium are being phased out. Its up to you to move it or lose it at that point.
Bob Smith
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