Creating a Personal Digital Archive

Dec. 31 -- Wondering what to do with all the photos, 8mm movies, and financial records you've got scattered about your house or office?

How do you back them up? How do you convert analog images to digital to stop the aging process? Can you trust digital backups? Here are a few approaches.

For the near term, you don't have to worry about file formats changing or CDs becoming obsolete, so just back up everything that's already digital to CDs or DVDs. Store one copy off-site, say at your office or in a safe-deposit box. Also, put the most important data on a home PC, so you have an easy recovery method. The biggest immediate dangers to data are user error and viruses.

For the long term — meaning 5 to 50 years — you must choose your media and formats carefully. Microsoft Office formats will still be around, or readily translatable, as will JPEG and TIFF file formats for photos and PDF file formats for documents. Video formats are in greater flux, but for now you'll be fine with MPEG-2 or the emerging and superior MPEG-4.

Now's the time to switch to recordable DVD from CD for backups. Buy a multiformat drive that supports "plus" and "dash" DVD media, and use only branded media; the same advice holds true for CDs. Cheap media can be troublesome. High-quality media will last a lifetime. That said, a cautious person would copy onto a new format every 10 years; this means your early-1990s CD-Rs are about due for replacement.

Pass the Paper, Please

For miscellaneous paper documents, the best way to archive is with a sheet-feeder scanner.

Unless you're a real type-A personality, start with the most important documents, meaning your year-end brokerage statements, your tax records, and a couple examples of your kids' drawings and homework from each year. Scan at 300 dpi and use PDF as the output format.

Why scan when you can get some bills online? Electronic bill presentment is still a joke, unfortunately. You really want your statements e-mailed automatically in PDF format, but what you get now is just a monthly reminder to go online, log on, view them, and manually download the statements.