Dear Eleanor
I do hope that nobody has resorted to a warehouse full of removable drives. It really would not work well organisationally, especially for long periods or for large volumes. The practical problems would be legion (indexing content, how to store other metadata, people losing drives and so on); drives would fail (quite likely faster than file formats become obsolete, but that is just a guess); retention management would lead to very strange physical organisations of records; FOI would be a nightmare; and so on. And even if you solve all these issues, portable hard drives will likely become incompatible within (probably) less than a decade. Please don't pursue this idea.
There is a wealth of experience and good practice emerging. While nobody can claim to have a definitively risk-free, forever generic answer, solutions in individual situations are possible and realistic. They generally include more than just the storage medium - things like format, metadata and organisation are just as important - and often are based on several copies of on-line media. This is all quite straightforward for new records, though trickier for a legacy of existing records.
This is really too big a subject to reply to comprehensively, so apologies for the this incomplete response.
Marc
-----Original Message-----
From: The Information and Records Management Society mailing list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Eleanor Rowe
Sent: 24 July 2012 10:14
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Archiving electronic data
Hello
I am seeking help, advice, information on how other local authorities have coped with permanent or long term storage of electronic data.
Basically we are going to The Record being electronic. This means we are going to have to deal with long term preservation of electronic information.
In the meantime the servers are beginning to creak and fall over and we don't have a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for endless new ones.
Some truly horrible solutions have been suggested, but I wondered if anyone anywhere had resorted to stand alone portable hard-drives for use by staff? I can see that using these, introducing a secure storage facility for them (just think a warehouse full of these to replace the paper files!), and a future proofing migration programme could work if controlled.
Thank you in advance for your contributions.
Kind regards
Eleanor
Eleanor Rowe
Records Manager
Moray Council
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