Digital Preservation
Digital preservation platform: records that still open decades from now
- Client
- A digital preservation software provider (name withheld)
- Sector
- Digital Preservation
- Scale
- Billions of digital records under active preservation
Some organisations hold records that have to survive for decades, but ordinary storage does not keep old files openable or prove they have not been tampered with. We were brought in to deliver the SharePoint integrations and the background processing systems for a platform that keeps billions of files readable, trusted and findable for the long term.
Technologies
- .NET
- C#
- Azure
- Microservices
- SharePoint
- REST APIs
The challenge
Some organisations hold records that have to survive for decades: national archives, governments, universities and large companies. Keeping them is harder than it sounds. File formats fall out of support, storage media wears out, and proving that a document has not been altered since the day it was filed only gets harder over time. Simply backing everything up keeps the raw data, but it does not keep an old document openable, or prove it is still the genuine original. What these organisations need is something that actively manages that risk, across billions of files in every imaginable format, to strict archival standards.
Our role
We were brought in to deliver two parts of the platform in particular.
- Bringing content in from where people already work. We built the integrations that pull documents straight in from SharePoint, so organisations could feed material from the Microsoft tools their teams already use into the archive, without a manual export step.
- The heavy lifting behind the scenes. We built the background, asynchronous systems that do the demanding processing an archive depends on: handling files of any type as they come in and running the ongoing work that keeps the archive healthy as it grows from thousands of files to billions, all without slowing down the people using it.
Around that, the platform does what ordinary storage cannot: it keeps track of every file's format, spots when a format is becoming obsolete, and moves a copy to a safer one while keeping the original and a full history, so material stays both openable and provably authentic for the long term.
The result
Archives, governments, universities and corporate records teams can trust that what they file today will still open, and still be provably genuine, decades from now. When they need something back, for a compliance check, a freedom-of-information request or simply to reuse it, finding it is quick rather than a forensic dig, and the whole preservation process can be audited from end to end.
