Did you ever migrate preservation data from one digital preservation platform to another?
chris de loof
This abstract gives insights on the lessons learned concerning a secured and trustworthy migration of 4 Pb of long-term preservation data stored on a cold storage platform.
The Belgian Science Policy Office (Belspo) has since 2015 long term digital preservation service for digital artifacts from the federal state. The technical architecture is based on a hyper secured ring network topology integrating all users and data centres. The two data centres are completely redundant and are equipped with an identical hardware infrastructure where cold storage is used as the main preservation methodology. Ingest, load balancing, authentication of users, integrity checks, file formats check, REST Api services, monitoring and retrieve workflows have been integrated in one middleware system. Belspo issued a tender procedure for the operationalisation of the hardware, software and service desk which was granted to a private partner.
The contract ended in 2022 and Belspo decided not to prolong the contract but to develop a renewed hard- and software architecture in-house with the Belgian association Smals, within the same yearly budget. Belspo launched a co-creation activity with Smals to setup a migration path and planning for the 4 Petabyte of unique volume of digital cultural heritage, research data and metadata, duplicated in both data centres. The first experiments with Arcsys showed that a simple installation, programming, and configuration did not permit to read the objects on the LTO7 tapes. A new methodology had been put in place to transfer the data in a secured way, within budget.
We stopped all new ingest in 2023, isolated the written LTO7 tapes, reconfigured one data centre and cold storage with Arcsys and began the one-by-one content migration via the Arcsys architecture with integrity and format check from one data centre to the other over secured network connectivity. Once finished the inverse operation started for guaranteeing a smooth duplication, while keeping offline the old tapes in case of lost or disaster which turned out to be an interesting decision. Two years later the operation is still going on, but with a 100% confidence not to have lost any bit.
governance, resourcing, and management for dp from document to data