DigiSafe: Secure long term storage for your files
Meeting the growing demand for digital preservation across the University with a renewed contract and reduced prices
The past year has seen growth in the use of DigiSafe at Oxford and we are pleased to welcome All Souls College, Trinity College, and Oxford Union Society Library to the DigiSafe family. With subscriber numbers continuing to grow, the supplier contract has been renewed for a further four years and we have been able to reduce prices for extra storage.
What is DigiSafe?
DigiSafe provides secure long-term storage of material with a range of built-in specialist digital preservation tools and reporting features. It offers a flexible and affordable solution for archiving with the security and convenience of SSO log in. Uploading files is as easy as drag and drop, with the flexibility to add your own metadata or rely on the built-in Tika metadata extraction. The platform is available to any member of staff belonging to a subscribing unit – colleges, departments and affiliated institutions.
The platform’s ability to combine metadata from existing catalogues as well as that embedded in the files themselves, reduces the effort required in moving files across. DigiSafe supports a wide range of file formats so even more unusual historic formats can be viewed within the web browser without additional software. Files are classified with the National Archives’ PRONOM standard so it is easy to get reliable information and make sense of the vast number of digital formats.
How subscribers are using DigiSafe
You can store many different things in DigiSafe. One college is using it to help with archiving student records and another is keeping digital archives safe and accessible. Our new subscriber, the Oxford Union will preserve a wealth of audio recordings from historic debates and speeches in DigiSafe for future generations.
Price reductions for extra storage
The cost of additional storage has been reduced by around 25 per cent which helps those storing larger audio visual and uncompressed image files of digitised material. As standard, each subscribing unit has a one terabyte quota, which can be increased by paying an additional fee. This gives users flexibility as there is no need to speculate about how much storage you might need up front – simply purchase it as you need it.
Benefits of using cold storage
We now have the first data in the ‘cold’ storage tier which has lower annual costs than the regular ‘hot’ data (which is accessed more frequently).
Cold storage is best suited for data which users won’t need to access often as there is a charge to ‘unfreeze’ or move from cold back to hot storage. Cold storage is ideal for uncompressed image or audio-visual files which take up a lot of storage space. An access copy for routine use can be made and kept in hot storage. Access copies are much smaller as compressed formats can be used as the original is safely preserved in its original form.
Anything kept in cold storage is read-only, so we recommend adding any metadata before moving your files to cold storage. Both hot and cold storage benefit from three copies of the data for integrity and resilience.
Further information and accessing DigiSafe
For more information about DigiSafe and to find out how you can sign up for the service, visit the Digital Preservation Service webpage or contact the team.
