When you think of archives, you probably think of dusty old boxes of paper documents, photos, diaries, letters and flyers, filed away in storage. But increasingly, our archival materials are digital, and material from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s are often stored on formats like floppy disks and CD-ROMs.

Aging and outdated technology has rendered decades of data, memories and cultural heritage inaccessible and at risk of being lost. The constant churn of computer hardware and software upgrades means digital content from as little as 20 years ago cannot be accessed via today’s computers.

We know so little about what everyday people used computers for when they first became available. This means we don’t exactly know what we might be losing – family narratives, unpublished memoirs and other important records.

So much of our history is now stored on outmoded digital platforms. To help combat this, we recently worked with members of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria to archive their own materials. Here’s some of what we found.

Saving the ‘born digital’

New computers don’t include CD-ROM drives, let alone floppy drives, and a lot of older software will not run on contemporary operating systems.

And physical storage media are deteriorating. CD-ROMs and floppy disks fail at alarming rates: in one study, only 8% of old CD-ROMs could be........

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