Centennial Storage -- what this is all about.

A few days ago, as I made a digital video of my baby daughter's attempts at crawling through our living room, a seemingly trivial question came up:

"Will I be able to show this video to my grand children?"

That is, of course, assuming that I ever get grand children, and that I will survive long enough to actually see them. There is also the small problem of assuming that the file format in which the video file is written can still be read then, or that it can be successfully transcoded over the decennia such that it can be read when it is needed. While these are relevant questions in their own right, I realized that there is an even more basic question that -although it seems simple- is not at all easy to answer:

"Will it be possible to preserve a file over the course of a few generations?"

(Of course, "a few generations" could be substituted by roughly 100 years, hence this Blog's name.)

In this Blog, I will document my efforts in researching this seemingly simple question.