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January 28, 2006
Everlasting Digital Archives
With the need to store large amounts of data beyond its active useful period in order to comply with government regulations, most organizations are in a quandary. They are put in a position where they need to build archives for their mounting data. Storage Networking defines an archive as a repository for organizational records that are no longer in use but may need to be accessed again. Physical storage devices take up too much space, and present a problem when records need to be accessed in quick time.
The best bet for firms is a digital archive, which uses digital data formats to store vast amounts of data and requires no physical space. The downside is that digital formats tend to change with amazing speed, which renders old records unreadable. Digital signatures are being used to overcome this obstacle. Also, data is stored randomly in zeroes and ones which are naturally unstable, and has no direct access method; computers are needed to decode them. To surmount this hurdle, multiple copies are preserved in groups of networked systems.
A modern archive has to be portable or software/hardware-agnostic. By hardware-agnostic, we mean that the software needed to run the innermost preservation layer must be hardware-independent and portable. Software-agnostic refers to the aspect that digital records must outlast the applications that created them.
A good digital archive should have gateways for the movement of data and metadata. It should also be relatively inexpensive when one considers the colossal amount of data that needs to be archived. Almost 80 percent of archived data is past its active life. So the main details that an organization seeking to build a competent digital archive needs to be concerned with are how the data gets into the archive (the process of ingestion), the methods used to access the data when the need arises, and the ways and means of preserving the stored data.
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