RELIABLE AUDIOVISUAL ARCHIVING USING UNRELIABLE STORAGE TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICES

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Description/Abstract

The drive for online access to archive content within ‘tapeless’ workflows means that mass-storage technology is an inevitable part of modern archive solutions, either in-house or provided as services by third-parties. But are these solutions safe? Can they assure the data integrity needed for long-term preservation of Petabyte volumes of data? The answer is no. Field studies reveal data corruption can take place silently without detection or correction, including in 'enterprise class' systems explicitly designed to prevent data loss. The reality is that data loss is inevitable to some degree or another from hardware failures, software bugs, and human errors. This paper presents ongoing work in the UK AVATAR-m project and in the recently started EC PrestoPrime project on a framework for storing large audiovisual files on heterogeneous and distributed storage infrastructures that allows various strategies for content replication, integrity monitoring and repair to be developed and tested.