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

Question

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.

Answer 1

I would suggest you take a quick look at a draft guidance doc from the NDSA "How and When to Check Fixity and see a bit about how frequent organizations are checking fixity in the NDSA storage system peport from a few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.