In this episode, Radio Free HPC looks an archival horror story from WGBH in Boston. As the PBS affiliate attempted to move its archived video footage to the American Archive Project, the organization was horrified to discover that many of their files on LTO4 tapes were unreadable.
GBH started receiving very worrisome reports that a high percentage of the video files they were sending to be included in the American Archive project were failing. These video files were either showing severe signs of corruption in QC or failing to open at all. The persistent difficulties that the archives department had in pulling these files off of WGBH’s institutional LTO 4 tapes over network storage was part of the impetus for WGBH acquiring their own, directly connected LTO 6 decks, which led directly to all the work I’ve done above.
Does your archive strategy match up with today’s storage economics? Henry contends that this is really worth a look as the notion that “write once to tape and forget” is a recipe for disaster. In an era where this WGBH archive could easily fit on 38 hard drives, does migration to tape still make sense?
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