Why Traditional Storage Systems Dont Help Us Save Stuff Forever

Baker, Mary ; Keeton, Kimberly ; Martin, Sean

HP Development Company

关键词: digital preservation;    archival storage;    repository;   

RP-ID  :  HPL-2005-120

学科分类：计算机科学（综合）

美国|英语

来源: HP Labs

【 摘 要 】

We are in the midst of an unprecedented transformation from physical to virtual assets. Online contracts, digital photographs, digitized movies, music, technical journals, corporate records, web sites, and government documents are just a few examples of valuable digital assets that organizations would often like to preserve for long periods of time -- not just for years, but for decades or even forever. Unfortunately, long-term preservation remains a huge challenge due to the unusual nature of the threats from which it suffers compared to traditional (shorter-term) storage applications. Our goal in this paper is to describe how these environments differ and to acquaint the dependability community with some of the challenges in building archival storage systems. We give some guidelines for an alternative storage architecture, much of which is being implemented at the British Library, and we conclude with some suggestions for initial research topics to be tackled in this area. Notes: Published in and presented at The First IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability, 30 June 2005, Yokohama, Japan 6 Pages