SNIA, the global digital storage trade association, announced the formation of a new provisional community, the Long-term Access, Storage & Technology Community. This group brings together stakeholders from the storage, preservation, and IT ecosystems to collaboratively develop a resilient, interoperable framework for the long-term preservation of digital information for the benefit of all communities that provide or use storage for the long term.

There has been much discussion on how to carry digital data into the future with the pace of technological development of storage technology. One of the concerns is that the digital data that represents the history of our time will be effectively lost, creating a digital dark age . This is a potential future where historical records and digital files are lost because the hardware, software, or file formats used to create them become obsolete.

My company, Coughlin Asociates, Inc. is one of the forming members of this new SNIA community and have been working with the various companies and organizations that formed this community for several months. The other founding members are Biomemory, Cerabyte, CERN, Lyrasis, SPhotonix, Versity Software, Vint Cerf and Western Digital.

I was part of discussions in the pre-SNIA community group, which also included staff from the Library of Congress. The basic idea was to come up with useable methods to be able to access digital data in the future.

The SNIA community hopes that their work can provide the technical groundwork that a standards body, may, in time, formalize. They hope to develop the framework, reference architecture, and vocabulary around long time data preservation and access. The group hopes to develop an official standard, perhaps through the IEEE, like the MRAM community is doing.

SNIA has a long history of pursuing efforts related to data preservation. In 2005 SNIA integrated the eXtensible Access Method (XAM) architecture and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) frameworks to help organizations manage fixed-content data and regulatory retention challenges. In 2010 related Active Archive efforts started that focused on online, power-efficient active archive solutions across industries such as healthcare, broadcast and finance.

In 2011 a Long Term Retention (LTR) technical working group was formed. This group worked to develop a Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF) to ensure that data remains readable independently of the original software applications. I was involved in some of these activities at the time. This group stopped development and group meetings around 2017.

Recent SNIA technical sessions at events such as the SNIA Storage Developers Conference (SDC) explore ultra-long storage solutions like DNA-based coding, silica glass media and cold data tiering required for artificial intelligence model training.

These topics will also be on the agenda for the 2026 SNIA Storage Developers Conference , September 28-30 in Santa Clara, CA. The 2026 SDC will feature talks on DNA storage and long term data access as well as many other topics.

SNIA formed a new community working to collaboratively develop a resilient, interoperable framework for the long-term preservation of digital information.