Long Term Information Retention (2011)

As more of the world’s information is digital throughout its entire lifecycle, we are faced with the age old issues of record keeping and preservation, applied to devices and formats that were never intended to last. Long-term digital information suffers from issues that didn’t exist in short-term or paper world, such as media and format obsolescence, bit-rot, and loss of metadata. The SNIA Long Term Retention (LTR) TWG has taken the lead on this issue for the storage industry. Working with key stakeholders in the preservation field, the LTR TWG is developing the Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF). SIRF is a low-level data format that enables applications to interpret stored data, no matter what application stored it originally. SIRF will be examined in a new European Union integrated research project, called ENSURE – Enabling kNowledge, Sustainability, Usability and Recovery for Economic Value. ENSURE creates a preservation infrastructure for commercial digital information built upon cloud storage and virtualization enablement technologies. It explores issues such as evaluating cost and value for different digital preservation solutions, automation of preservation processes, content-aware long term data protection, new and changing regulations, and obtaining a scalable affordable solution by leveraging cloud technology. The presentation will cover use cases, requirements, and the proposed architecture for SIRF as well as its potential usage in ENSURE storage services.

Learning Objectives

Recognize the difficulties in long-term digital preservation, and how they differ from short-term.
Learn best practices and techniques to mitigate the risks inherent in long term preservation, and how those can be applied to today’s storage systems.
Identify some of the related standards developed within SNIA and other organizations that are relevant for long term digital preservation.
Discuss the need, use cases, requirements, and proposed architecture of SIRF.
Discuss the latest activities in the development of SIRF.