Technology is moving so fast that today's robust solutions may quickly become obsolete in the next few years. This poses a big issue when it comes to storing/archiving your data. To illustrate, let's suppose you have some data from back in the 1990s (let's not go beyond the 90s).

Back then, most of that data was saved on floppy disks (still remember what a floppy disk looks like?). Since it could only store 1.44MB of data, chances are that you had them coming out of your ears and tried to store them in some "safe" place. But how do you make sure that it stands the test of time? How do you make sure that the data is still useable once you decide to restore them a few years later - especially when it's near impossible to find floppy disk reader nowadays?

Even if the floppy disk era is far long gone, the same issue remains with other means that once were used. I'm thinking of tapes and zip disks. While they once were the high-tech solutions, they needed specific devices in order to be useful. When was the last time you found a working external zip drive? If you are a personal user, I'm almost sure you didn't even rely on tape drives for your backup purposes.

Now, I can see you smart readers always thinking ahead - your backups are on CD or DVD drives: those devices have been there for years now, and even though Blu-Ray and other technologies are emerging, a plain old DVD drive is still a great option to save your music and photo library. However - DVDs do get scratched, not to mention it's a pain to manage multiple DVDs. The same issue also happens with external hard disks. How many times I've heard friends who kept 1TB of family photos etc, just to lose them in a snap because the disk has fallen: tens of years of souvenirs gone away.

What about your e-mails?

E-mail is another story. We started with POP3 e-mails that were stored on the ISP's servers. Typically, once you've downloaded your e-mail to your desktop or laptop, then it's up to you to find a way to archive them since the ISP don't keep a copy of your e-mails anymore. Guess what: computers fail and unfortunately the chances are that you've already lost your e-mails during a re-installation process.

A more elaborate solution came with IMAP that allowed access from multiple devices: but most of the times you couldn't store a year-long set of e-mails on the IMAP server: you've been given a quota on your inbox, though you had to remove some "old" e-mails in order to receive new ones.

Could a cloud-based e-mail solution help?

If you play the "demanding" customer, then you'll find out that serious Hosted Exchange providers give you some bonus options - to store your e-mails for 10 years for example. What's interesting with this is that, as a customer, you don't have to worry on which device they'll store your e-mail, all that matters to you is that you can have access to it whenever you want it: no more scratched DVD, nor lost media device. Should technology evolve and the old ones become obsolete: it's not your problem - that's the issue of your Hosted Exchange provider.

Hosted Exchange 2010 is a business grade email service available from Giacom. For more information, visit www.giacom.com.