Archiving Edition

Today, advanced digital storage media gradually take the place of hard-copy (paper), microfilm and analog video tape. Hard disks usually are the first media of choice for storing this rapidly expanding digital content. But although hard disks are ideally suited for storing large amounts of 'living' data, they should be questioned when it comes to storing infrequently accessed data for archival purposes (be it for business or legal reasons).

Scanned invoices, Dicom images, sent and received fax messages, email archives, production logs, video recordings,… to name just a few, are examples of digital assets that contain important business information, but the vast majority of it will probably never be needed again. Keeping these digital assets on secure hard disk based storage will be extremely expensive due to the cost of high-capacity RAID volumes and especially their related management costs (including regular backups), which are calculated to be at least 5 times the cost of the storage itself.

It is therefore more economical to off-load these inactive data to much cheaper and highly reliable media. With Archiving Edition, automatic migration can be triggered from an unlimited number of data volumes to on-line or off-line storage. A back-end database keeps track of where all files are stored.

Archiving Edition has originally been developed as a solution for migrating data to DVD for off-line storage. DVD technology offers several attractive advantages for data archival : a very low cost coupled with an interesting capacity (4,7 GB  per media) and an important lifetime (more than 20 years). Furthermore, since a DVD is universally readable thanks to its standardized file system, long-term information accessibility is guaranteed.

Archiving Edition has a direct output to the Rimage CD/DVD publishing systems (www.rimage.com). With these devices, the off-line archival and retrieval process can be easily automated. DVDs will be written whenever certain criteria (or a combination of them) are met : the size of a folder, the presence of a specific file (trigger) or a latency time. One or more copies can then be produced and they will be printed with a unique (customizable) label using either thermal or inkjet technology.

Files that have been written out to DVD can then be deleted from the file server, freeing up space; they can also be left intact (but will not be eligible for migration again) or they can be moved to NAS, hard disk, CD/DVD library, ...

Multiple applications

- Broadcast compliance recording

- Archiving for ERP applications

- Prepress/CAD project archiving

- Large files archiving like medical imaging

- Photo mini-lab automated CD/DVD output

- Incremental backup/archiving of file servers

- Paper scan to CD/DVD

- Audio & Video on demand

Fully unattended process

Backup & archiving operations will start automatically, triggered by:

- Folder capacity (watermarking)

- Presence of a file (polling)

- Latency time

- A schedule (every day, month, …)

Easy to use

A user-friendly graphical interface will help you manage and monitor the backup, archive & restore operations. A query tool lets you find and retrieve all backed up/archived files based on search criteria (file name/type, date range, content, …).