Digital Preservation Q&A - Recent questions tagged software

Do you have any LTFS Tape Library Recommendations?

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 14:44:05 +0000

Hello all,

My institution currently uses LTO tape as part of our backup strategy for both business and collections data. We are both scaling up the number of tapes we create and are seeking to switch to the LTFS standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape_File_System) for our collections data. We are looking for an LTFS-compliant tape library to help us increase our capacity, and I'm hoping that some of you might be able to share some details about what you're doing...

If you use tape for backups, do you use LTO? If you use LTO, do you use LTFS or a different standard/format?
What kind of tape drive/library set up do you have?
What software do you use to manage your hardware?

What organizations are preserving software?

Thu, 13 Aug 2015 20:04:13 +0000

I've been building a list of organizations that are attempting to preserve software including:

NIST's software reference library
some game archives such as Stanford's
Microsoft has an internal Archive
the Internet Archive is doing amazing work
so is the National Library of Australia
the play it again project
the University of Michigan Archive
Rhizome are preserving software based/dependent art
as is MoMA
and of course the computer history museum is also

There are resources here and here with more information but I'm interested in community input.

But who else is doing software preservation?

Would anyone else find such a list useful?

Strategy for preserving scanned files outside of repository

Wed, 01 Jul 2015 04:05:52 +0000

We have undertaken various digitisation projects the past couple of years; each item digitised has resulted in output in TIFF, JPEG and PDF formats, with up to 600 or so TIFFs/JPEGs for some items.

We have loaded the PDF files into our research repository. However, our repository software does not accommodate too well more than a dozen or so files at the most for each record. So we need to find an alternative mechanism for storing at least the TIFF files (the JPEGs and PDFs can always be regenerated again from the TIFFs). Currently, we have 3 copies of each of the files stored on our local network (as well as whatever system backups occur), until we can figure out a more permanent preservation strategy.

We're now at the point where we want to figure out that more permanent strategy. The PDF files in the repository will remain the primary access point. Can anyone suggest a suitable approach/software for the preservation masters?

Tools for identifying obfuscated files, specifically password protected and encrypted formats?

Sun, 23 Nov 2014 23:11:54 +0000

I am looking for tools capable of detecting and flagging up encrypted and password protected files in any given collection.

First there is a necessity for a tool that is capable of doing this and understanding what is out there (and its range and abilities). Second there is a requirement for usability and distribution to a probable non-expert audience.

Note: This question was first asked in 2013 and a handful of answers canbe found here: http://anjackson.github.io/zombse/062013%20Libraries%20&%20Information%20Science/static/questions/1445.html

What tools do you use for the ongoing monitoring of checksums?

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 17:20:26 +0000

I am currently working on choosing and implementing a tool to continuously monitor checksums for our digital holdings (digitized content and born-digital materials) across our entire institution. We have a lot of data on our preservation server (we have many terabytes of data, and want to plan ahead for the near future when we break a petabyte) that we want to continuously monitor for bit-rot, and we're wondering about the experiences of other institutions.

What do you use to monitor the fixity of your preservation masters on an ongoing basis? What (generally speaking) is the workflow like to make sure that checksums happen as often as they're supposed to?

Bonus points if you know of a tool that is automated (or at least schedulable), and super-bonus points if it could work on our server and have multiple user accounts for different content administrators.