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The Digital Continuity project

The Digital Continuity project

Digital Continuity project

The Digital Continuity project is led by The National Archives. We are acting on behalf of government departments to create a shared service solution to the challenges of protecting vital digital files from technological obsolescence.

What is digital continuity?

Electronic communication is how government does business. Yet the average life of a piece of digital information is just five to seven years. Vital government information is becoming unreadable or even unrecoverable because the media it is stored on is deteriorating, hardware and software is no longer in use, or successor products cannot read old files. For example 5 ¼ disks, though commonplace 20 years ago, are now obsolete; CDs and DVDs have a finite lifespan; software such as WordStar, used to view documents, cannot easily be run on modern machines.

In brief

  • Digital continuity means protecting your files from technological obsolescence
  • It´s about making sure your data is migrated to new formats as appropriate
  • It covers the sorts of information which you may not need on a daily basis, but which you cannot afford to lose.

Don't ignore digital continuity

If government departments do not take action there is a real risk that they will not be able to access information that is more than five to seven years old. That means no access to everything from inquiry findings and evidence in criminal cases, right through to budgetary and pensions information, sensitive foreign policy decisions and the location of buried nuclear waste.

Some data could be recreated, but this process is time-consuming and expensive. Some data would be lost forever. How could we replace CCTV images of the 2005 London bombings, for example, or raw scientific data from natural disasters?

Did you know?

  • An estimated 10 per cent of the Canadian Government´s electronic records are already no longer readable
  • A recent study by the National Science Foundation in the US found that the average cost of recreating just 20 MB of data was $64,000
  • In May 2006, global financial services firm Morgan Stanley agreed to pay $15 million to settle civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission that it failed to produce tens of thousands of emails dating back to December 2000