Managing massive amounts of digital media

Our institution is starting to produce large amounts of digital media (such as videos), many of which can go into hundreds of megabytes. The aggregate of all of these will, of course, be many gigabytes - and there will only need to be more space required as time goes by.

I was wondering what a good strategy for managing these would be? So far as storage is concerned, IT infrastructure is worried about the performance hit that such large files will cause. I don't think a solution such as backing these videos up to external drives or optical media is ideal, either - these videos have a permanent retention period assigned to them, and such a solution leaves them vulnerable to format obsolescence.

I was wondering - what do other archivists and records managers do to deal with such a huge quantity of digital content?

You need to be a member of Archives Live to add comments!

Join Archives Live

Email me when people reply –

Replies

  • FATS Digital is a leading archiving solutions provider for motion picture film, video, audio, still images and microfilm. These assets tend to create very large archive files. We are currently digitising several thousand motion picture films, videos assets, audio assets and 35mm negative film strips for a number of customers.

    In every instance, in addition to delivering the archive back on portable HDD's or NAS, we are also backing these large archives up to LTO tape written in an LTFS format. LTFS is an open standard so any recipient of the LTO tapes will be able to recover the contents without any propriety software. It is an inexpensive robust solution. It is the industry standard developed by HP, IBM and Quantum. It has been around since 2000 and is now in its seventh generation with a clear road map for many generations in the years ahead.

This reply was deleted.