When we first started building media vaults we were concerned with the proper storage conditions for media storage.  In eht 1980’s were were very concerned with protecting media and microfilm.  

When we contacted Dr. Adelstein to ask how he stored his media samples to determine their longevity as they stated at the time 30% RH at 68º as I recall.  Temperature is easy but holding humidity at such a low level for a long period of time with no fluctuation was problematic!

So we asked how he did it and he replied that they cut the microfilm up into strips, placed them in bell jars and dropped the humidity to 30% and then sealed the jars and then stored those jars in a properly cooled (not humidity controlled) environment. That works for tis but it is not a solution for archival storage.

It was a game changer.  We had to develop special moisture barriers and special vault doors and the ability to safely condition a vault. Concrete as a media vault became ridiculous as concrete walls wick in moisture almost as fast as you remove it. 

Typical air conditioning cannot drop the humidity to 30% on a summer day. And then the low humidity of winter created it owns problems as site up north could drop to 15% to 20% on extremely cold days. 

As the one post referred to looking for the diamond ring in the light, it is also silly to test media in bell jars and low humidity if you cannot create that environment in the real world.  We solved that problem with dessicant wheel dehumidification ( Munters CargoCair units) and while that is expensive it lowered the air conditioning equipment cost and greatly lowered the power costs.

Media is affected by oxidation (everything is), bacteria and light radiation, solar flare activity and the people developing the media never look for the unified solution. No one is handling this stuff with white cotton gloves.  In 30+ years of vaulting, we continually run into new risk sets. The people on the ISO committees never seem to look at a cross section of the real world.  Solutions developed in Bell Jars and Labs don’t work if they are not common and affordable in the real world. Seldom are storage environments built by people who really know what they are doing.

CD’s are really only concerned with the first millimeter as that is where the directory is.  It takes special software to move into the CD and read it and recategorize it if your handling affects the outer and most vulnerable edge. Density makes them want to use every millimeter but couldn’t they place the index of what is stored on the disk in the middle of the disk. Even the storage cases are designed to inflect abuse on the outer edge.

Until someone develops a media that is first durable, then cheap and then high density will they get it right. Those who get it right are rejected by the IT people.  The new LTO5 Media and beyond seem to be heading in the right direction.  But the Cloud doesn’t want to see new drag and drop, low cost and durable media because it is everything they are not.  Simply because the LTO5 and newer and be stored offsite in secure media vaults and make the Google, IBM, Dell Cloud models look an accident waiting to happen.

Plus how does the fact that the NSA, CIA and the data center storage in the Utah Data Center affect everything. Hackers are most likely in there as there was no special effort to make it secure first prior to loading it with every bit of our nation’s data. The government’s efforts here are a risk to American business at a level unrealized until now. They used the highest tech to stop low tech terrorists and now opened all of us to identity theft, corporate identity theft at a scale no corporation is capable of protecting against.  They used poor foresight in developing this listen in technology because IT people don’t think about risks just volume and speed and Utah is that in spades.

Nuclear weapons helped end the War in the Pacific and opened a Pandora’s Box of unimaginable consequences.  The Federal Government’s data gathering has put all the golden eggs of our government and our economic engine in a road side fruit stand with a cigar box cash register.  That works here in rural Pennslania but not in the big cities. It does not work in an environment where China, Russia and the hacker nations see an open market on our information assets. 

The Cloud is a huge open window to vital information, the government’s mining of it and our phone information just make it so easy to steal. While we do this our enemies create archives to move off line.

How are you as the records manager or information governance expert solving this problem?  ISO offers a disjointed look on storage versus security, IT offers a speed and density model devoid of security and our government is the worst of all as it develops technology that is outdated before they can roll it out. No algorythmn of encryption has been able to stand up to a government directed hack. Keys can be stolen, centralization just creates the greatest thrill for the hacker and all our efforts to hide the puzzle pieces are confounded by a government that goes around collecting them and storing them in their hives.

I would like to see the governance experts take a global picture of the problem and work backward. The CIA and NSA just made moving data offline sexy as hell because anything digital and still online is at risk. I see a role here for governance people to point out the King has no clothes and push our government to create distributed storage with linkage only available by an Amish wagon dragging tapes from one data center to another.

People do not understand the Amish but guess what?  No one knows what they are doing? Ahh the old is new again. 

Hugh Smith
FIRELOCK Fireproof Modular Vaults
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(610)  756-4440    Fax (610)  756-4134
WWW.FIRELOCK.COM

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