Formed in 2004, the SNIA’s 100 Year Archive Task Force (100YrATF) is operated by the SNIA’s Data Management Forum as a global, multi-agency group working to define best practices and storage standards for long-term digital information retention.

The 100YrATF was created by SNIA because of the pending crisis in long-term preservation of digital information in the IT datacenter.  The crisis has two principle challenges:

1. Losing information that is stored digitally due to corruption, loss of access, loss of discoverability, or loss of readability
2. Losing control of the ability to keep up with migrating the overwhelming volume of information to new media and into new logical formats.  

Much of the remaining work to be done to solve long-term information preservation challenges lies in the storage domain. 

Our Goals:

• With a multidisciplinary team, produce a best practices for long-term digital information retention reference model that covers the information-storage domain-- the technology domain unaddressed in all existing ‘archive’ standards and best practices such as ISO 14721:2002  - Open Archival Information Systems, OAIS, or the Sedona Conference.
• Integrate ILM-based practices into the long-term digital information retention process so we can sustainably automate IT infrastructure in support of business and information requirements.
• Define reference models and possible technical standards that solve and provide for the two ‘big challenges’ of preservation, scalable physical and logical migration.

What's new?

The 100 Year Archive Task Force is now entering the next phase of its work.  In addition to developing a best practices reference model, we are beginning to move our technical projects into SNIA's technical council in order to form a technical working group.

This is your chance to participate in defining the technical and best practice solutions to the two critical challenges facing our industry - solving physical and logical migration.
Plans are being made and now is the time for you and your company to have a voice in defining these solutions - or be left out.

Download slides that outline our Phase II activites.  Continue to learn more....

JOIN US!

We invite you to join our conference calls as we organize our new committees. Send a note to  Co-Chair Gary Zasman for the schedule.   We look forward to working with you!

Active Projects:

• The 100 Year Archive Requirements Survey
  
• Long-Term Digital Information Retention Glossary - now under review.  Terms will be included in the "100 Year Archive Best Practices Guidelines" and SNIA dictionary. Click here to review and comment
• Market Education:  Active Speaker's Bureau available for your events, public website with educational materials, publishing of white papers, and "Ask the Experts" dialog
• A reference model of storage best practices and architectures to elimate physical migration requirements
  
• Definition of a draft logical format standard: Formation of a SNIA Technical Working Group based on integrating the OAIS Archival Information Package (AIP) with XAM, so that applications have the ability to write an archival information (container) format with storage interoperability. This project is currently called the Self-Describing, Self-Contained Data Format (SD-SCDF) and the overview presentation is downloadable below.

Join the DMF and the Task Force and participate further.

Documents and Presentations:

• 100 Year Archive Task Force Overview   (presentation)
• Peter Mojica - "The 100 Year Archive Dilemma" (webcast)
• Michael Peterson - "The Coming Archive Crisis"  (white paper)
• Michael Peterson - "Solving the Coming Archive Crisis"  (presentation)
• Simona Cohen - "Towards a Self-Describing, Self-Contained Data Format"
  The 100 Year Problem Statement and Resource Links
  

To Participate:

Are you a vendor, integrator, or service provider involved in long-term archiving, or a governmental, RIM, IT, or regulatory compliance professional? Join us and help shape industry standards and best practices as we define storage solutions to meet the challenges of long-term digital information retention.  Our charter includes educating customers so we also have an active speaker's bureau which you can access or participate in.  Send a note to Co-Chair Gary Zasman if you would like to join or need more information.