2020 IASA - FIAT/IFTA Joint Conference

The vast majority of physical media created for data storage is no longer in use. Considering Moore’s Law and the quasi-exponential advancements in technology, we may very well take it for granted that the media supports we use today to store our precious achives will sooner or later be admitted to the ever growing museum of obsolete media. As archivists and developers of archive technologies, we need to acknowledge data migration as a necessity.
However, migrating an entire archive from one physical support to another is almost always a burdensome and costly process, taking people out of their routines and as such, being usually postponed to the limit of causing a catastrophe if not done.
That’s when the idea of continuous migration takes center stage, turning it into an uninterrupted, transparent and almost automatic process, part of the daily activity and workflow of an archive, cutting costs and guaranteeing its continuity and longevity.