A large portion of the audio-visual heritage of our time is already stored on digital media or will be transferred in the near future onto such media. Unfortunately, current digital media are even less stable than traditional media and therefore periodic data migration every few years is mandatory. This approach is very cumbersome and risky. However novel concepts show a way out of this dead end situation. The underlying idea is that the digital data should not be passively migrated, but it should actively migrate itself. The idea is to develop future archiving concepts which are modeled on nature, i.e. on the living system. The genetic code (which is basically a 2-bit code) is the basic information for all biosystems, and it archives the information about species very successfully. Computer viruses and worms, despite being a severe nuisance, demonstrate that artificial live can be very successful and is very difficult to exterminate. Instead of having a maleficent payload, viruses and worms could be beneficial carriers of archived information and thus turned into positive “beneware”.