Thumbs.db – what are they for and why should I care? Jenny Mitcham. Digital Archiving at the University of York. 7 March 2017.
Post about the thumbs.db system files and how to deal with them in an archival situation. Windows uses a file called Thumbs.db to create thumbnail images of any images within a directory, and the thumbs.db files are stored in each directory that contains images. They proliferate quickly. If the Windows Explorer preferences must be set to display hidden files and "Hide protected operating system files" option also needs to be disabled in order to see these and other hidden files. IT can change account options to stop these thumbnail images from being created.
"Do I really want these in the digital archive? In my mind, what is in the ‘original’ folders within the digital archive should be what OAIS would call the Submission Information Package (SIP). Just those files that were given to us by a donor or depositor. Not files that were created subsequently by my own operating system."
[In our data ingest workflow, we use a utility that creates a csv file of items in directories for processing. The csv file is the ingest template which contains the file names and file metadata. This controls the files that are ingested. Unwanted files are removed from the csv file, which means that during ingest time, they are excluded from being ingested into Rosetta. - Chris]
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