Preservation is done through formal activities that are governed by policies, regulations and strategies directed towards protecting and prolonging the existence and authenticity of data and its metadata.
War and natural disasters combined with the lack of materials and necessary practices to preserve and protect data has caused this.
Usually, only the most important data sets were saved, such as government records and statistics, legal contracts and economic transactions.
The first digital data preservation storage solutions appeared in the 1950s, which were usually flat or hierarchically structured.
[5] While there were still issues with these solutions, it made storing data much cheaper, and more easily accessible.
Everything from governmental to business records to art essentially can be represented as data, and is amenable to be lost.
[12] Catalogues, directories and portals are consolidated resources which are kept by individual institutions, and are associated with data archives and holdings.
[4] In other words, the data is not presented on the site, but instead might act as metadata and aggregators, and may administer thorough inventories.
The repository can be single or multi-sited but must cooperate with the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System,[16] as well as adhere to a set of rules or attributes that contribute to its trust such as having persistent financial responsibility, organizational buoyancy, administrative responsibility security and safety.
[17] Cyber infrastructures which consists of archive collections which are made available through the system of hardware, technologies, software, policies, services and tools.
Cyber infrastructures are geared towards the sharing of data supporting peer-to-peer collaborations and a cultural community.