Cost and security improvement of the Long Time Preservation by the use of open source software and new ISO standard in the National Library repository

Paradowski, Dariusz2025-09-242025-09-242018https://repository.ifla.org/handle/20.500.14598/6260Long Time Preservation (LTP) Policy besides high-level organizational elements should comprise technological foundation based on available technologies. Omitting this element can undermine rationality of the former. The LTP System should: • be independent from a single manufacturer and have known data path, • be permanently ready for total disaster (The Doomsday Clock is now as close to midnight as it was in the fifties), • be scalable in capacity and performance, • keep costs within available budget. • The carrier and format themselves should be sufficiently durable to limit the frequency of migration. The analysis of these criteria led to the selection of well-established technologies based on open or well-documented standards, independent from a single manufacturer: • Magnetic tape - decades of experience and predictable shelf life, • Linear Tape Open (LTO) - many manufacturers produce tapes compatible with drives from various manufacturers, • Linear Tape File System (LTFS) - allows exchanging data between compatible systems from different producers using open-source software. In the year 2016 LTFS became adopted as ISO/IEC standard, • Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) – XML container of digital objects. Above technologies and some our inventions were used to develop the software of new LTP System. • The System has since worked productively for 10 months and archived almost petabyte of data. • Cost per byte (3 copies) is more than order of magnitude lower than in the former solution. • The System uses standard tape library, is scalable and redundant. • Digital objects saved (each integrally) on every single tape are readable and may be migrated without any knowledge about the LTP System. • The entire data resource is easily transportableengAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Cost and security improvement of the Long Time Preservation by the use of open source software and new ISO standard in the National Library repositoryArticlehttps://2018.ifla.org/open accessLong Time PreservationDigitizationDigital librariesMagnetic Tape