[Pasig-discuss] Write-blocking a RAID

[Cory Snavely]

Hey, David. You raise a good point, but also a blatantly obvious one. 
Clearly, there are both immediate triage issues and long-term retention 
issues. I sure hope folks don't feel like I hijacked the conversation 
due to hysterical anxiety about format obsolescence. ;) I think the OP 
knows getting the server up is step 1. I simply raised the long-term 
issues because a) they were not coming up on the thread, b) some vendor 
solutions could in fact set the stage for expensive migration later and 
be easily avoided, and c) the original question was submitted by 
archivists, who presumably do have long-term preservation in mind, so 
it's important to unravel their underlying needs from their stated question.

You can think about the preservation strategy now, or you can start 
thinking about it in a few days, but it would be incomplete advice to 
the OP to not mention it at all.

I also suggested a very viable alternative - good ol' tar - that is both 
practical, cheap, holds up pretty well from a format obsolescence 
perspective, and could very well address both the short-term and 
long-term issues simultaneously.

On 11/05/2012 01:15 PM, David Rosenthal wrote:
> On 11/05/2012 10:05 AM, Mark Fitzsimmons wrote:
>> Hi Cory,
>>
>> Great point. You are absolutely right, file formats will become obsolescent.
>>
>> This will happen over time to particular formats that you have copies of.
>>
>> You will inevitably need to convert/preserve the content of those files to
>> an accessible media type.
>>
>> An inventory of the files you have and by type will provide the reference
>> point you need to track the impending migration of them ahead of
>> obsolescence.
>
> Whether or not at some point in the future there is a risk of format
> obsolescence, the files need to be extracted and put some place
> reasonably safe, as soon as possible. At this stage, worrying about
> formats is a waste of time and effort. Worry about formats after
> you have all the bits safe.
>
> It is truly amazing how each and every discussion of digital
> preservation gets hijacked by the "OMG format obsolescence" meme.
>
> See http://blog.dshr.org/2012/10/formats-through-time.html
>
> 	David.
>
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