Charlie has a nice
article for geeks like us.

He does a good explaining about the challenge of living in a digital age for many
of multimedia type people. Granted Charlie has much more data than most of us. I have
been pretty diligent about moving the majority of my media to optical storage. Granted
optical storage like CDs and DVDs will degrade it is MUCH slower than tape base media.
I still have some broadcast BetaCam and
small amount of 3/4"
tape that I would like to convert to a digital format while the media is still
probably in good shape.

It is really amazing how fast tape degrades. I remember from my broadcast TV days
that even fairly recent tape edited on BetaCamSP started to deteriorate enough to
notice within the first few years. Hard to believe but it is true.