Introduction

Hoppla is an archiving solution that combines back-up and fully automated migration services for data collections in small office environments. The system allows user-friendly handling of services and outsources digital preservation expertise. An increasing amount of digital collection held by small institutions, SOHOs (Small Office/Home Office) and private users with limited know-how and awareness of digital preservation drives the need for new approaches of fully-automated archiving systems.

Small institutions are often hardly aware of changes in their technological environment. This can have serious effects on their long-term ability to access and use their highly valuable digital assets. In some countries, the law requires that business transactions remain available and auditable for up to seven years. Moreover, essential assets such as construction plans, manuals, production process protocols or customer correspondence need to be at hand for even longer periods of time, in case of maintenance issues, lawsuits or for business value. To avoid the physical loss of data, companies implement various backup solutions and strategies. Although the bitstream preservation problem is not entirely solved, there exists many years of practical experience in the industry, with data being constantly migrated to current storage media types, and duplicate copies held to preserve bitstreams over years.

A much more pressing problem is logical preservation. The interpretation of a bitstream depends on the environment of hardware platforms, operating systems, software applications and data formats. Even small changes in this environment can cause problems in opening important files. There is no guarantee that a construction plan for part of an aircraft, stored in an application-specific format, can be rendered again in five, ten or twenty years. Logical preservation requires continuous activity to keep digital assets accessible and useable.

Digital preservation is mainly driven by memory institutions like libraries, museums and archives, which have a focus on preserving scientific and cultural heritage, as well as dedicated resources to care for their digital assets. Enterprises whose core business is not data curation are going to have an increased demand for knowledge and expertise in logical preservation solutions to keep their data accessible. Long-term preservation tools and services are developed for professional environments to be used by highly qualified employees in this area. In order to operate in more distant domains, automated systems and convenient ways to outsource digital preservation expertise are required.

With Hoppla, we are currently developing a solution that combines back-up and fully automated migration services for data collections in small institutions and small and home offices. The system builds on a service model similar to current firewall and antivirus software packages, providing user-friendly handling of services and an automated update service, and hiding the technical complexity of the software. The logical preservation is performed by using established best practice preservation strategies and supports multiple migration pathways for object formats. Multiple backup accross different storage media avoids the physical loss of the data caused by physical deterioration of media.

Contact

For Questions/Comments please contact: Hoppla Team

Software

Publications

Team

Stephan Strodl		Andreas Rauber
Petar Petrov		Michael Greifeneder
Maria Egly (AIT - Austrian Institute of Technology)

Former Team Members: Florian Motlik

Kevin Stadler