Arkivum 101 Series: Digital Safeguarding

Data corruption takes many forms, and has many causes. Often the likelihood of these risks increases with time. Some of the more common causes of data corruption include:

• Bit rot and data decaying: the gradual corruption of data over time as the individual bits that make of all of our digital content change or become corrupted, ultimately resulting in a loss of data.
• Physical media degrading: if stored on physical media (hard drives, CDs, USB sticks etc.) data is at risk as the media itself degrades with time. Life span and average annual failure rates of media varies dramatically by type, manufacturer and model.
• Accidental deletion: users can unwittingly delete data, often due to unsuitable access controls or processes.
• Complete or partial server failure: even if stored in the cloud, data must reside within a physical location. These storage servers must be maintained, and can fail, causing data loss.
• Fire or flooding occurring within a data centre: damage caused to servers through fires or flooding (either through natural disaster or otherwise) can put data at serious risk of loss.
• Cyber-attacks and ransomware: malicious attacks by criminal bodies poses significant risk to data loss and in some cases, being held to ransom.

But what do these all have in common?

Firstly, no tool or solution can stop any of these from occurring. Secondly, without the proper digital safeguarding practices, they result in the loss of long-term data and valuable information…and once lost, data is almost impossible to recover.

Digital safeguarding can and has been specifically designed to protect you and your organisation’s data for when the worst does happen.                         

Introducing Digital Safeguarding

The process of safeguarding mitigates the risk of data loss, providing you with the tools to avoid the negative impact of corruption. Detailed below are four crucial steps built into the Arkivum solution, to safeguard customers’ data against these risks. The Arkivum solution has been designed and built to align with digital archiving and preservation good practice. These steps embody that good practice.

1. Check all data on entry using a “fixity check” – this ensures that all the data is healthy and is exactly the same as it was before transfer into the archive.
2. Store a minimum of two copies of your data in separate geographic locations. An optional third “Escrow” option provides extra safeguarding and protection if required.
3. Automatically and regularly check (through more fixity checks) every file within the archive, to quickly identify any changes to your data, corruption or otherwise.
4. Ensure a process is in place to replace any damaged or lost data, however it occurred, with a healthy copy from one of the other storage locations.

Digital safeguarding protects you and your organisation against the impact of data corruption, and is essential to achieving 100% data integrity in line with good practice guidelines and principles such as FAIR, ALCOA+ and others, forever.

If there’s one thing to take from this post, don’t wait until it’s too late.