When creating, organizing, and archiving your data, you can take some initial steps to ensure that your data remains usable and understandable for the future:

■ Effectively document your data so it can be understood in the future.

■ Periodically move data to new storage media (discs degrade over time).

■ Keep more than one copy of the data and on different storage media.

■ Migrate data to new versions of software or use a format that can be easily imported into various software programs.

■ Share the data and metadata in a reliable repository that offers long-term data preservation.

Ideally, this should be included in a data management plan at the beginning of a project, so you can consider the time and resources involved in your budget.