Storage (Digital)

Group 47 in Woodland Hills, California, is working on ways to get around the fact that our drives and discs have a limited lifespan. Instead of writing 1s and 0s as magnetic signals, they write them as microscopic dots onto metal tape, using a laser in a system called DOTS. The tape is then stored in cartridges. A high resolution digital camera can read the data back, but all a future human would need to retrieve the image is knowledge of binary code and a microscope.

Testing a Permanent Digital Storage Archive – Part 1. Chris Erickson. September 9, 2015.
For about the past seven years I have been testing the M-Disc permanent digital storage media. The M-Disc is designed to use inert, permanent materials, so that digital data written to the discs are permanent.

Table of Contents
Special Issue on Data, Records, and Archives in the Cloud
Guest editor: Luciana Duranti
http://digitalcollecting.com.au/node/961#overlay=node/add/article

The use of cloud storage in digital preservation is a rapidly evolving field and this guidance explores how it is developing, emerging options and good practice, together with requirements and standards that archives should consider. Five detailed case studies of UK archives that have implemented cloud storage solutions have been compiled as part of the Guidance and are available as standalone linked documents. Sources of further advice and guidance are also included.

March/April Volume 21, Number 3/4

When evaluating cloud storage providers, it is dangerous to assume such services are only storage and therefore uncomplicated or that requirements for storage are obvious and therefore inherently met by the service provider. Experience with any technology selection will prove the opposite. No two services are the same and the variance between services often represents the difference between successful implementation and a failed initiative. Never purchase a service without proper vetting; uninformed decisions risk loss of time, money, and even assets.

Appeared in Proceedings of the 22th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS 2014).
For three decades, Kryder’s Law correctly predicted an exponential increase in bit density on disk platters, leading to an exponential drop in cost per gigabyte. However, disk now is over 7 times as expensive as it would have been had Kryder’s law continued unchanged from 2010, and industry projections suggest that in 2020 the gap will reach 200 times.

Although migrating library applications to Cloud environ- ment is not an easy task, many libraries are interested in using Cloud infrastructure services broadly across their busi- nesses, whether is about a Public, Private or Hybrid Cloud. One of the migration expectations is the scalability of dig- ital preservation architectures in Cloud environments. In this paper, we address the scalability of storage and com- pute platforms, which combine storage of large datasets and their processing.

David Gallaher was eight years old in 1964, watching satellites twinkling high overhead. That year, the first American to orbit the planet left NASA, the Soviets put the first multi-person crew in orbit, and one tiny satellite, Nimbus 2, was taking grainy black-and-white images of the entire surface of the planet.
Seventeen years before the start of what we know as the “modern satellite record” of sea ice, Nimbus series satellites were snapping images that would turn up on two huge pallets in Gallaher’s office in Colorado 50 years later.

This White Paper describes the technical challenges and potential solutions for preserving digital artifacts, for long intervals of time (several decades, centuries) in a new world of massive, distributed data.

After introducing the basic concepts of Long-Term Digital Preservation, we show several examples of its importance in different sectors. Then, we explore the challenges that make this technical field a complex one, and in each case, we study the emerging state of the art that will define its evolution in the near future.