There is little doubt, that a predictive costing tool would be usefull to plan
and manage the preservation of digital content, in fact it should be indisspensible to
most archives, one should be inclined to think.
Predicting future costs is allways difficult, every prediction can only be accurate to a certain point, as we
cannot fortell the future. There are many parameters to be taken in account, and technological progress
seems difficult to plan.

For some time I have been trying to get a copy of the life3 spreadsheet for evaluation, without success.
This seems to be one of the unpredictabilities, involved in the task of planning.

It apaears, that within the digital preservation coummuniy there little interest in the question of being able
to estimate the cost of longterm preservation.
At the Amsterdam Hackaton of the open planet foundation, the workshop on life3 was not very well visited.

Could it be, that projects of digital preservation have no difficulties in getting financed, no matter what?
 Is the question of cost a secondary, cumbersom question, which the digital preservation community tries
 to avoid as much as possible?

It seems logical, that the less accurate prediction of cost of longterm digital preservation is, the more
probable a preservation project will end up, generating more cost, or even ending up in a debacle, as can
be observed in several c4istar military network devellopements, with a seemingly unlimited funding.

If there is a slight dissintrest within the digital preservation communit for the question of being able to
more or less predict longterm costs, how could this be explained?
Is the future of digital preservation something completly unpredictable?
Are we heading for a magnificent bill, we haven’t really expected, a unpleasant surprise?

Maybe the questions involved in longterm digital preservation are still to new to humanity to be able to
make any predictions and I am left to mourne over the loss of data produced by my good old sinclair
zx80,which I had saved on a casette recorder.
I couldn’t have predicted the cost of longterm preservation of that data at the time (with a prediction tool
 I should be able to tell, how much it would have cost me then to still have my data now, with no future
 telling involved), and I wonder what excelent tool could help me do better.