FIVE sizerelativetonewer,currenttechnologydrivesmake data migration prudent. The rapid increase in drive size has necessitated that the migration of data be doneforamoreefficientconsolidationofthearchive before there is a danger of the hard drive failing. The cost per GB of hard drive storage has been cut roughlyinhalfwitheachadvancingyear.Asof2009, the average cost is around $0.10. As your archive grows, migrating the image data to larger capacity hard drives can protect against data deterioration and make managing the archive easier. For instance, it is easier to keep track of the well-being of one terabyte drive than a small army of ten 120 GB drives. Media and file format obsolescence adds to the problem of physical decay or failure of archive and WhileconvertingrawimagedatatoJPEGorTIFFis one strategy for avoiding image format obsolescence, thelossynatureofJPEGandthelargesizeandfixed natureofTIFFareproblematic.Convertingtoastan- dardrawformatisabetterchoiceforimagearchives. Currently,AdobeDNGformatistheonlycandidate. Still, even DNG files may need to be migrated to a subsequent DNG version or to a replacement format as yet unknown. An important feature of the current DNG specification is that all data is preserved. Even datathatisnotunderstoodorusedbyAdobeorthird- partysoftwareispreserved.Althoughitistooearlyto tellhowsuccessfulitwillbe,thePhaseOneEIPformat mayofferanotherpath.ItusestheopenZIPformatto wrap up the raw image data with processing instruc- tions and any applicable lens cast correction data.