Digital Preservation

A rack of hard drives with an automated robotic arm.

Digital Preservation

We are SOC2-certified repository that maintains best-in-class operational practices and technical procedures to ensure that your data is continuously monitored and protected in the long-term.

Preservation

Over time, digital files can lose bits, become corrupted or unreadable, or disappear entirely. We maintain best-in-class operational procedures to continuously monitor bits and ensure long-term protection of files in accordance with the preservation standards established by the Library of Congress.

The Digital Repository maintains file integrity by enforcing strict technical and operational standards for file protection and by utilizing superior systems that guarantee bit protection. We additionally work with multiple mirrored locations to create file duplicates and provide recovery in the event of a disaster.

View our Digitization and Preservation White Paper

Storage

The Digital Repository has approximately 80 petabytes of data across our preservation systems. By constantly monitoring every digital file in our repository, we can see if any piece of media has any degradation and replace the media by copying the file from one of many backups. This process ensures that data is always accurately preserved.

We offer storage solutions for both short-term and long-term storage. Our high-speed, high-performance disk storage and low-demand tape storage are easily accessible on Macintosh, Windows, and Linux platforms. Through our innovative partnership with Dell, we have established secure and encrypted storage options that protect your data by storing it in multiple locations. We make it easy to access and interact with your files by offering iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, HTTPS, and other file rapid file retrieval methods. We accept archive files from Symantic Net-Backup, Backup Exec, and Comm Vault. By offering multiple tiers of storage solutions to address each client’s individual needs, we can help organizations with data management, backup, archive, geo-spread multi-site, and disaster recovery. 

PowerScale by Dell: Industry-leading Scale-out NAS with unmatched agility and performance for unstructured data. 

  • Data Protection built directly into the architecture (N+1 Protection)
  • The leading replication tool on the market Sync IQ for disaster recovery
  • Integration with IBM Aspera

Dell Data Protection Suite: Best-in-class data protection tools provide you choices and flexibility in protecting critical data.

  • Flexibility to deploy across both physical and virtual environments
  • Unmatched speed and de-duplication rates when paired with Data Domain
  • VMware and diverse application integration to ensure interoperability and ease
  • Covers all data protection functions including replication, snapshots, backups, and archive

Access

The Digital Repository boasts a robust technical infrastructure, powered by one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in the nation. We are connected to over 100 high-performance research and education networks all over the world, which include high-speed Internet2 and LambdaRail connections. Our expansive network ensures that files can be efficiently uploaded or downloaded, streamed in real time, and recovered in the event of a disaster. Collections of files in all sizes can safely be transferred to the Digital Repository from anywhere in the world. Once in the system, you can easily retrieve the entire collection or search for specific elements using keyword tagging and other metadata. We ensure that your digital collection or data sets are available and delivered securely and reliably using our content distribution network (CDN). We also have the necessary disk storage space and direct access to large-scale, high-performance distributed computing networks to provide specialized remote access to large data files. We offer customizable access controls for files and collections, which can be set broadly or at the individual user level. We can additionally implement a schedule for routine file removal and destruction.

Security

The Digital Repository takes security very seriously, and we have implemented measures to protect our clients’ data. Our data center is housed in a secure, well-guarded facility with a two-stage fire suppression system and backup power to ensure uninterrupted access to your data. USC’s Information Technology Services (ITS) also maintains an information security group that constantly monitors all systems for potential outside threats. To further ensure optimal security, ITS has established robust policies for firewalls, vulnerability scanning, and other critical efforts.