How to preserve Your Data Digitally

Digital Preservation refers to the mechanism applied on digital material like  files, or groups of files, that contain information in digital form for keeping them alive so that they can be accessed and used later even in the situation where the hardware and the software becomes obsolete or non-usable.

It is important for managing personal data as well as it is equally important for larger repositories that manages various objects. It focuses on long term use of digital objects to avoid the issues like, migration (related to transferring of data or files from one storage to another), data redundancy (where copies of a particular files have been created) and emulation (when someone tries to imitate the original work of someone else).

As the obsolescence of technology is more in comparison to any other field, So we need to manage more actively our digital possessions to help them in their protection and it has created the requirement of creating the versatile and appropriate technical solutions where any kind of digital data is stored and can be retrieved later even after a very long period of time. It is important because these preservations can be used to validate the work with the work that has already been done and can use resources which inspires them and if there is a situation where the data is being lost that will be a loss for every circle of society.

During the preservation we need to take care that the data should also not loses its potential. Digital Preservation is also important as it allows us to gain the knowledge and recreate the data sets that are being archived and our cultural heritage is now saved in digital formats where it can be retained till any period of time.Hence, It is important to make people aware about the challenges also of digital preservation.



Courtesy: Ms. Rashmi Trivedi (Faculty, IMS Noida)