A computer based method for the preservation of a digital information in a data set includes receiving a data set to be preserved, the data set including a plurality of preservation objects; creating a fixity table, the fixity table including one or more data types corresponding to preservation data types contained in the preservation objects, each data type being assigned an importance rank and one or more fixity function; for each preservation object, creating a Merkle tree corresponding to the preservation object and based on the fixity table.