Paper - iPRES 2011 - Singapore

One of the most important challenges in planning and maintaining a digital repository is to predict the needed resources on a long term basis, especially storage size and processing power. The main problem emerges from the need to migrate the data at certain times to newer file types, which takes time and alters the needed storage space, potentially branching into several migration paths for individual objects. Understanding the effect of different policy decisions, such as when to migrate or whether to stay within a format family or branching into several format families turns into a complex task, specifically when considering non-trivial ingest structures and assumptions on format evaluations. In this paper we present ReproSim, a framework that simulates the evolution of a digital repository and helps predicting these factors. We demonstrate the complexity and power of simulation to assist in preservation decisions in a set of scenarios involving different ingest and preservation planning profiles.

iPRES, Singapore

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