Challenges in Storing Multimedia Data for the Future - An Overview

Preserving access to multimedia data over time may prove to be the most challenging task in all things concerning multimedia. Preserving access to data from previous technical generations has always been a rather difficult endeavor, but multimedia data with an almost endless succession of encoding and compression algorithms sets the stakes even higher, especially when not only considering migrating the data from one generation earlier to a current technology but from decades ago. The time to start thinking and developing techniques and methodologies to keep data accessible over time is right now because the first challenges become visible on the horizon: How to archive the ever growing (and growing exponentially so) amounts of data without major manual intervention as soon as a storage media runs out of free space. Is there such a thing as “endless storage capacity”? Would an “endless storage capacity” really help? Or do we need totally new ways of thinking in regard to archiving digital data for the future?