Technology Review - The Net Effect: Rememberance of Things Past Today it is data, more than money, that is the lifeblood of our society. And yet more than three decades into the "Information Age," data is something that we still don't quite understand how to steward. Data is not physical, not something that you can lock away today and hope you'll be able to access in 10 or 20 years. Large collections of data are almost impossible to safely maintain—especially over long periods. At the same time, data is just as difficult to dispose of properly. Indeed, individuals and businesses now have so much data in so many different formats on so many different computers that we are all heading for our own individual data catastrophes.