How digital and physical preservation compare

Preservation activities take place across both physical and digital domains, and these domains are deeply interconnected. Digitization of physical collections creates digital assets that require long-term management, storage, and access, often alongside the continued retention of the original physical materials. When a manuscript is digitized, for example, the original still needs to be preserved and stored in appropriate conditions, as well as its digital counterpart. As a result, many organizations now carry parallel preservation responsibilities that can significantly influence their overall environmental footprint.

Comparing the environmental impact of physical and digital preservation is complex and should not be approached as if it is a simple choice between one or the other. Each relies on infrastructure, energy sources, materials, and life cycle processes. Physical preservation typically depends on climate-controlled storage, conservation treatments, materials, and transport, while digital preservation relies on data centres, storage media, networking infrastructure, and ongoing computational activity. Both generate carbon emissions and other environmental impacts throughout their life cycles.

Environmental impact is shaped not only by the type of preservation, but by how that preservation is implemented. Factors such as storage density, redundancy, retention policies, refresh cycles, access patterns, and energy sources can have a greater influence on overall impact than whether collections are physical or digital. In many cases, decisions made for operational, legal, or access reasons, including maintaining multiple copies, supporting high levels of availability, or retaining material indefinitely, can amplify environmental costs unless explicitly managed.

A holistic approach is therefore required. Understanding the trade-offs between physical and digital preservation involves considering full life cycles, including infrastructure construction, energy consumption, material use, maintenance, migration, and end-of-life disposal. It also requires recognizing shifts in cost and impact from capital expenditure (such as buildings or equipment) to ongoing operational expenditure (such as energy and cloud services) and ensuring that these shifts are visible in sustainability planning. Furthermore, attempting to measure the carbon costs of physical preservation may require you to gain an understanding of the carbon footprint of your whole organization.

The table below outlines key factors that influence the environmental impact of physical and digital preservation. Its purpose is not to determine which approach is ‘more sustainable’, but to support informed decision-making, encourage proportional preservation strategies, and highlight opportunities to reduce environmental impact across both domains. Note that the environmental impacts described in this table go beyond just the carbon footprint. Also note that there is inevitably some physical infrastructure associated with digital preservation, thus environmental costs of physical archive stores (such as temperature control, lighting, security) will also apply to data centres. The table thus describes the differences, but also the similarities in the two approaches.

This table provides an illustration of how physical and digital preservation activities impact on the environment.