It’s no secret that there’s a hole in the digital filmmaking workflow when it comes to archiving. In the days when film acquisition was the only game in town, your negative was the archive, it stayed in the can ready for whenever you needed it. In the days when videotape ruled the land, each tape was the archive, you put it on the shelf and it was waiting there for you years later. In memory based recording, there is no physical object on which your media lives permanently. It’s shuffled from expensive media card to inexpensive hard disk, where it’s edited, and when it’s done, perhaps laid off to tape, or more and more these days, delivered on a another hard drive.
Some people are using hard disks as an archiving solution. Shane Ross of Litte Frog in High Def fame, has come up with a nice system, but it’s really more of a 3-5 year medium term solution rather than a true archive.
Hard disks are intricate mechanical devices, not designed for long term storage. And who’s to say when the data interface will be obsolete? (Try to get data off a SCSI II drive these days).