Digital archivists struggle with the question of whether there will be equipment available to read data from media that was many years before. It's not a simple matter of keeping devices for decades because all interfaces, including things like computer I/O buses, network interfaces and even power cables need to be preserved.
Carter George at Ocarina has a good post today discussing what some of the implications of dedupe technology are for archival storage. He touches on software issues, metadata and legal topics that need to be considered. If you have an interest in using dedupe for long term archival you probably need to be paying attention to what Carter is talking about here.
Comments