[ecoinfo] data archiving best practices

[Wilson, Bruce E.]

James -- thanks for sending the link.

John -- The substantial trend is to put things on spinning disk, with multiple copies.  Even large NASA centers are moving away from tape storage to 100% on-line.  

At a file level, I would argue (though I don't have a good reference for this) that the best practice is to maintain three copies, on spinning disk, with one substantially remote from the first two, and maintaining file checksums to guard against bit rot.  Best practice also includes using file formats that are stable (as noted in the link James sent).  For modest amounts of storage, there is a very definite interest in using the Amazon cloud storage (or equivalent) as the third copy.


============================================================
Bruce E. Wilson (wilsonbe at ornl.gov) 
Manager, ORNL Distributed Active Archive Center
Environmental Sciences Division 
Oak Ridge National Laboratory 
(office) +1-865-574-6651




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Message: 3
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:54:09 -0700
From: John Kim <johnbkim at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ecoinfo] data archiving best practices
To: ecoinfo at ecoinformatics.org
Message-ID:
	<bb732a90908131054t58211606n6ebb81cc6060eca9 at mail.gmail.com>
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Thank you James. What about in terms of storage media?

John


On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 8:25 AM, James Brunt <jbrunt at lternet.edu> wrote:

> Hi John -
>
> This article started out in Ecological Bulletin and has since been
> updated several times. It's a good started place:
>
> http://daac.ornl.gov/PI/bestprac.html
>
> It cites a number of other important publications.
>
> James
>