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As more organizations store more data longer, the information technology industry in the U.S. seeks a better way for data management in 2005. A record is a record, whether it's a sheet of paper, an e-mail, an electronic document or a digital image. It is the content that drives retention, not the media it's written on. Recent federal regulations are requiring more companies to save more content for longer periods of time. While content may be king in theory, in practice, the media on which it's stored and the software that stores it present problems. As digital tapes and optical discs pile higher and higher in the cavernous rooms of offsite archive providers, businesses are finding them increasingly expensive to maintain. The storage industry is working on the problems of data archiving from various angles. One solution to the backward-compatibility problem is to convert data to common plain-text formats, such as ASCII or Unicode. Another approach is to use PDF files to store long-term data. On the media side, the Storage Networking Industry Association is working toward solving what it calls the '100-year archive dilemma' through a standards effort for media.