Effective archiving means being able to access data with relative ease, according to Hu Yoshida, chief technical officer of Hitachi Data Systems.

In a blog post which coincides with the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, he argues that it is "senseless" to store data with no hope of accessing or retrieving it at a later date. He advised readers to look out for the "grainy images" of the moon landing that were likely to appear on news broadcasts on the 40-year anniversary on July 20th - adding that this is an example of the importance of effective storage routines.

While higher definition tapes of the television footage were kept at NASA mission control, they were subsequently lost.

Mr Yoshida writes: "While we are generating more and more data every day, we are also losing a lot of the meagre amounts of data that we had in the past."

His comments come following a Computerworld article which reports that the techniques being used to clean old NASA tapes and retrieve the data stored on them currently include vegetable steamers and liquid nitrogen.