

Sony’s generation 2 of ODA, compatible with Archival Disk Format, will be shipping early in the second half of this year. It’s one of the longest lived, most open archival choices you can make.

Sony’s ODA is right at the centre of the new movement towards using Blu-ray for long-term archive. Once you’ve made your archive, it’s always your archive. The optical cartridge maintains backwards read compatibility with future optical disc drives, with a clear roadmap to generation 2 and 3 drives. Backward compatible, ready for the futureĮnjoy the best backward compatibility of any archive format. There’s no fast forward or rewinding: this is a disk, not a tape. The laser-based contactless media also offers excellent resistance to temperature changes, humidity, dust and water. Optical Disc Archive keeps your precious data safer for longer with a guaranteed 50+ years archival life.

Use Optical Disk Archive with Sony’s Media Navigator software and you’ll be able to find your archived content as easily as if it’s on your local hard drive. Appears in the Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST07), February 2007. Removable ODA cartridges are available in capacities from 300 GB up to 3.3 TB, with a choice of re-writable and write-once formats. Optical Disc Archive works like a hard drive, but it’s much more permanent. With Dual Vendor support (Sony and Panasonic) the new Archival Disc format, of which ODA is part, is an ultra-reliable format with more than a 50 year lifespan. Large internet corporations like Facebook are considering using it for storing data that you don’t need to access regularly and which must remain accessible over long timespans. In fact Blu Ray is now seen as one of the best options for long term storage. Optical Disk Archive is not an evolutionary dead-end. Optical Disc Archive is based on UDF, the open, vendor-neutral file system that’s used in CD, DVD and Blu-ray Disc and now with the new Archival Disc format from Sony and Panasonic. Standards based, open and format independent

Sony’s Optical Disc Archive (ODA) answers these problems, by ticking these four essential boxes. What happens if you want to restore a tape in ten or fifteen year’s time? And if you want to retrieve something tomorrow, how easy will it be? In the past, archiving had an at least partly justified reputation for being difficult and unreliable. You need to have a strategy for archiving. Your material is only valuable if you can retrieve it quickly and safely. You might even struggle to make alterations demanded by a client to the project you’ve just finished.Ībove all, you have no way to preserve the value of your content. Without it, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to find important material that you need for your next project. This is to significantly improve recording performance of the hard disk. When you format the hard disk, it is important to change its Allocation unit size setting from 4 to 64 kilobytes. Dar compresses each component so it knows when to switch slices (the output may go to multiple slices on multiple disks or sticks).Optical Disc Archive - Gen 2 coming this year!Īrchiving is a vital part of any content business and the good news is that it has just got both easier and better.Īrchiving is a vital part of any content business. Milestone recommends that you use a dedicated hard disk drive for recording storages and archives to prevent low disk performance. Oh, and because of the way dar works, it has to be able to compress a stream. Is there a study with this kind of info? Has anybody got experience with compressing large archives? Better compression is nice, but right now I just want to control the amount of time it's taking. So I want a compressor that can handle 3 TB in a day. This is on a dual-xeon machine with 32 hyperthreads, but not all that fast 4 GHz) This is for my personal hobby so price matters.Īnyway, I started one that's 3.4 TB with dar, using the xz:0 compression and I'm 24 hours into it and the result is only 740 GB, and I have no idea what percentage of the job has been finished. I'm aiming to put the results on 8 TB external drives, but it would be neat to be able to fit more than one backup on a drive. They're modest sized for RAIDs, at perhaps 3 - 10 TB. I'm using dar (like tar, but optimized for hard disks) for backing up RAID volumes.
