In our earlier article, we introduced the concept of data archiving and covered the data integrity and reliability demands you should make of your  archive product. Just as important is ease-of-use.  To really extract value from your long-term data you need to prioritise access to your data whenever you want it. 

Immediate and hassle-free data access is incredibly important when selecting an archive solution. You shouldn’t have to wait hours or days before you can retrieve and use your data.  Imagine the frustration of waiting days to source a  piece of data only to discover it is corrupt or incorrect.  This is especially true for the meta-data that is attached to your files – which is often used to make rapid decisions about which data to retrieve.

Live, immediately accessible data, adds enormous value.  It is possible to  build a live service via a web platform on top of the archive.

The access, however, must adhere to the data integrity issues, outlined previously, with checksumming at every point. 

The recovery from failure also needs to be transparent.  That is, if a checksum fails, the archive system needs to recover it immediately and continue to deliver the data with integrity.

If these archiving articles have got you asking some hard questions, and your current arrangements  have come up short, consider looking for an alternative solution. 

At DUG, our online archive checks all the right boxes.

You can tailor an archiving package that can scale as you grow, offering unlimited capacity.

Data is accessible via a read-only POSIX’s compliant file system.  Management of the archive is provided by a set of tools that provide all the safety and integrity checks-and-balances you expect.

The archive system is able to recover from corruption and failure seamlessly while delivering data to you without delay.  The data retrieved will be verified as bit-for-bit the same as the data you originally wrote.

Our archive architecture uses open-source products, well-accepted by the storage community as safe, secure and reliable.  We use industry-standard hardware and protocols to guarantee your data is safe as it is transferred to and from the archive, or around the world.