2.10 Summary
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software required to read the archived files. These are serious concerns for individuals and
organizations alike. Individual family members may have much less access to the digital
photos of earlier generations than their ancestors had to the analog prints preserved in
albums in drawers, closets, and attics. Governments, courts, hospitals, law firms, and busi-
nesses of all kinds also clearly have a substantial stake in the preservation of digital data.
The challenges of preserving this data are already clear. Digital tapes must be
periodically refreshed and the long-term durability of optical formats, especially the
“recordable” and “rewritable” variants, is not completely known. Other widely used tech-
nologies, ...