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What are best practices/recommendations for how often to check fixity of content?

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My institution is working toward incorporating fixed-interval fixity checks into our preservation workflow. I'm interested in hearing about what policies and procedures other institutions have implemented to manage this process and what your "fixed interval(s)" is/are. Context about the number of files you curate and how that has influenced your fixity check workflow would be extremely helpful.

asked by elisedunham on 24 Jul 2014 · 3354 views· ✔ jump to accepted answer

1 answer

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✔ accepted

I would suggest you take a quick look at a draft guidance doc from the NDSA "How and When to Check Fixity and see a bit about how frequent organizations are checking fixity in the NDSA storage system peport from a few years back. What comes out in that is that 34% of the organizations from the NDSA that participated in the survey check at fixed intrervals. Which is relativly low, but I imagine will be higher in the future.

Of the 34% that check on fixed intervals htere were a lot of varriance between monthly, quarterly, and annual.

46% check fixity of content on at least a monthly basis.
21% check fixity of content on at least a quarterly basis.
29% check fixity of content on an annual basis.
4% check fixity of content on a tri-annual basis.

answered by

tjowens on 24 Jul 2014