What determines the archive costs?

We can define the four principal areas of which cost development is more or less independent. These areas certainly have a mutual influence and each area is not isolated. The various areas are the following:

$ The total cost of the archive structure - the appropriate part of the capital cost and the annual running costs - that holds the storage space.
$ The total annual cost of the staff working for the archive.
$ The annual cost of the raw materials such as the tapes, forms and office equipment which are necessary for the archive to operate.
$ The annual cost of the sound equipment needed to play-back the original information carriers and to copy it onto the archive carrier - again, part of the capital costs and the annual running costs.

Because it concerns a comparison between an analogue recording tape and a R-DAT cassette as archive carrier, our main interest at this stage is the calculation of the storage costs.