Kryder’s Law refers to the rapid increase in areal storage density of digital storage media in the past decades and has often been used in digital preservation economic forecasts.
Presented at UNESCO’s conference ‘Memory of the World in the Digital Age”, this paper presents a growing body of evidence suggesting that Kryder’s Law will not necessarily hold in the future in the same way that it did in the past.
It proposes a new economic model for digital storage, which is currently being developed, that aims to be used for scenario planning by digital archives and which can be integrated into broader models of digital preservation costs. Results from prototypes of this model shed light into the impact of the recent spike of storage prices and the cost-effectiveness of cloud storage.