Digital Linear Tape from 2002

We are thankful to the Arcadia Foundation for funding a project derive and evaluate digital tape and hard drive preservation practices.    We have used DLT tapes and offline hard drives for over a decade to cost effectively store video files.   As we bring them online, we need to understand the workflow as well as the frequency of media failures and develop approaches for dealing with failures.

We intend to bring hundreds of

320GB Hard Drive from 2006

terabytes of video data from offline storage to online disk storage and then post our experiences this as a kind of case study.   As one can imagine, most data comes back flawlessly, but it is the failures that take time and care.

Online data storage machines used by the Internet Archive

Again, we thank the Arcadia Foundation for seeing this is a big issue in large digital library efforts, and we hope we can help others as they come to grapple with the same issues.