Wednesday, October 05, 2016

How many copies are needed for preservation?

How many copies are needed for preservation? Chris Erickson. 4 October 2016.
     An important component for preservation is to have multiple copies. The specific questions are: how many copies, how should they be stored, and where should they be located. Many people advocate the 3-2-1 rule for digital storage: three copies, stored on two different media, and one copy located off-site, preferably in areas with different disaster threats. (NARA; Library of Congress) The NDSA levels also incorporate this rule in the storage section.

The copies we have been looking at are:
     Copy 1: Rosetta storage on spinning disk in the campus data center
     Copy 2: Tape copies of our archive in the Granite Mountain Record Vault.
                    Annual Tape archive plus incremental transactional backups
     Copy 3: Internet copy, with DPN or Amazon Glacier
     Copy 4: Access copy within Special Collections on M-Discs or our CMS
What we choose to put in DPN will affect the third copy. We need to determine if these copies are adequate, and if not, then find different storage methods that are cost effective and fit within our workflow.

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