Re: [ARSCLIST] long range file storage

[Damien Moody <dmoody@xxxxxxx>]

My department is investigating the use of checksums for the National Audio Visual Conservation Center. Checksums are a good way to validate files. Our concern here, though, is that our archive will be so large and process so much data that we may not be able to create/compare checksums on every file - perhaps only 1 to a few percent. We may just have to accept a certain amount of file corruption risk. But we'll surely continue investigating ways to ensure file integrity for extremely large archives. 

Damien J. Moody
Information Technology Services
Library of Congress

>>> seubert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 08/11/05 11:04 PM >>>

We are currently creating parallel preservation copies, both online and
on optical media, but eventually I see us phasing out the physical
media. Before we do that, one thing I feel is necessary and that we have
been discussing is the integrity of the data stored online. Once the
data goes onto disk, there is no practical way to manually make sure
that files haven't become corrupted over time, during a backup and
restore process, or during a migration from one system to another. We've
discussed using checksum files created upon ingest that would be
periodically and automatically compared against the files to ensure that
nothing has become corrupted. In case of corruption, the original file
could be restored from tape. I've noticed that the audio files in the
Internet Archive have associated checksum files so you can make sure
that the file you have downloaded is identical to the original. I don't
know if they also use these to ensure data integrity over the long term.

Has anybody looked into this further or implemented this for archiving
audio files?

David Seubert
UCSB