Maintaining multiple drives can mitigate this. In the case of long term archives that may not be migrated and are resident on legacy media, care must be taken to ensure that compatible and operational drives, as well as suitable systems, are available. Tests should be executed subsequent to major upgrades to ensure continued access to the data, as new systems and software may not recognize legacy drives and formats. There is the chance that through oversight or changes, legacy data is unavailable due to operational problems such as insufficient documentation and legacy procedures. Consider the consequences of password protected backup tapes without passwords or legacy applications that lack documentation.
Some older systems use proprietary hardware.
Market Dynamics Beyond the physical problems of technology, market dynamics play a big role in determining the viability of technologies. The market dynamics we will look at will examine the impact of changes in the marketplace that influence the critical areas of media, hardware, archival software, and operating systems. Over the life of the data, the changes induced by the marketplace are most likely to influence the availability and prevalence of various technologies. As storage demands grow we find capacity demands continue to increase. One of the consequences of the growth of capacity is the increasingly shorter production cycle for media of lesser capacity.