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Preserving Only the Raw Byte Stream

This is the most inexpensive solution by far and minimizes development costs. One just has to copy the bits and record boundaries as they exist on one tape onto new storage media. This process may include checking the contents of the tape against the paper dump logs, but nothing more would be done. If we were particularly clever, we could copy the old tapes onto more compact media in a simple manner, saving us money on media costs. One obvious problem with this minimalist approach is that the knowledge to interpret the data is being lost much more quickly than the data on the tapes themselves - so the real danger with this approach is that in 10 years, we might have hundreds of gigabytes of tapes that we cannot make sense of.



boogles@martigny.ai.mit.edu