How It Works

Simply stated, the Foundation for Data Permanence ensures that data is not dependent on the survival of
the company that stores it. Here is an overview of our patent-pending system for providing data continuity protection:

The FDP acts like a trust fund for data storage companies. For each sale of storage, the service invests a percentage of their gross revenues with the FDP. The amount invested is based on a conservative estimate of the operational costs required to maintain the data over the allotted term. These funds earn interest over time. Each month a fraction of the investment is paid back to the service to spend on necessary storage costs such as power, labor, and hardware replacements.

Should the original business fail or terminate its service, the FDP will use the funds to contract a replacement service or manage all of the abandoned data itself.

The Foundation keeps rigid standards when establishing relationships with companies and supports only those committed to saving information forever. The FDP does not endorse companies with economic models that inherently threaten data continuity (e.g. those requiring minimum annual purchases or ongoing fees) or terms of service that permit arbitrary file deletion. Currently, the Foundation exclusively backs Swiss Data Group, a company that provides a family of permanent data storage services. Look for the FDP logo on a service’s website to tell if it is supported by the FDP.