The inevitable loss of data and the last printed photo

How many digital photos, music and word processor documents do you store that you consider valuable? Do you have backups? What software was used to create them and when was the last time you attempted to open a five-year-old document?

An article in the back pages of December’s issue of Rolling Stone magazine makes clear the challenges and pitfalls of recording, preserving and recovering information in the digital age. Major music labels such as Sony Music Entertainment are finding that some digital recordings less than a decade old cannot be recovered due to degradation of information or, more often, the loss…