It is important to keep track of technologies obsolescence and decay as well as changes to the intended use of the information. To support managing this, IBM has developed the Preservation Manager. It provides the functionality for defining and managing the technical environment needed to render the digital assets. It stores technical metadata for every file format. Technical metadata specify the software and hardware needed to render the digital assets. Based on the concepts of Preservation Layer Models (PLMs) and View Paths. PLMs define different templates to hold specific technical metadata that describe the hardware and software required to use an asset. The set of actual technical metadata based on a specific PLM is a View Path. View Paths can be associated with specific file formats or a collection of assets. Over time the chain could be broken at different places, as software and/or hardware components become obsolete.