Personally, (and this is from experience), if you recopy the data on your
floppies every couple of years to another floppy (or other medium) things
should be fine.

As an example, I have had many Violano rolls that I have been archiving in
an obscure format on 8 inch soft sectored floppies. These rolls were recorded
before the advent of PCs and MIDI. (How many 8 inch floppy drives have you seen
lately?) So in order to protect the 60 or so disk I have, I migrated the
contents to 5 1/4 inch disks after a few years. Again, after 3 1/2 inch media
came out, I migrated to them. Right now, I am in the processes of burning
the data onto CD-ROM.

Because digital data is so easy to replicate, the life of the media should
not be a problem as long as copies are made on a regular basis. The real problem
as I see it is what does the data mean. As an example, if I gave you a copy
of the Violano rolls that I have archived, you would have great difficulty
in figuring out what the data means and how to get it to play. So, I have
written a description with the data of how to interpret it. It would be
a shame if the data survives, but the format is unknown.

25 years from now will MIDI SMF Type 1 (or 0 or 2) still survive? If so, will
there be documentation to explain it. (Lets hope so.) So, I try to put
an explanation of how to interpret the data with it. So many of the things
we call "Standards" today are short lived; especially in the computer world.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Jim Gallops¶
gallops@gallops.com