Building LABDRIVE, a Petabyte scale, OAIS/ISO 16363 conformant, environmentally sustainable archive, tested by large scientific organisations to preserve their raw and processed data, software and documents

Vast amounts of scientific, cultural, social, business and government, and other, information is being created every day. There are billions of objects, in a multitude of formats, semantics and associated software. Much, perhaps the majority, of this information is transitory but there is still an immense amount which should be preserved for the medium and long term – perhaps even indefinitely.

Preservation requires that the information continues to be usable, not simply to be printed or displayed. Of course, the digital objects (the bits) must be preserved, as must the “metadata” which enables the bits to the understood which includes the software.

Before LABDRIVE no system could adequately preserve such information, especially in such gigantic volume and variety. 

In this paper we describe the development of LABDRIVE and its ability to preserve tens or hundreds of petabytes in a way which is conformant to the OAIS Reference Model and capable of being ISO 16363 certified.