Mass CD/DVD Migration: A Novartis Case Study
Danielle Bienz, Rudolf Gschwind, M. F. Pozza, Louis Gantner · 2010
Nowadays computers are an essential part of modern pharmaceutical research and data storage. It is also well known that experimental and observational data is crucial for scientific research. For approximately twelve years now, the pharmaceutical industry is storing its research data on portable storage media, where each research group was obligated to archive their research data on such portable media but they had also much individual responsibility for the archiving process. So far there are over 3.000 portable media in the raw data archives of Novartis. Digital data archives are more unstable than paper-based archives basically due to development of computer technology and rapid changes of digital storage media. To guarantee the future readability and to preserve the research data, Novartis has decided to migrate the data from the current portable storage media to a storage type more suitable for long-term preservation while preserving the authenticity and provenance. In this paper, we would like to report on this migration project that nicely illustrates several problems of digital archiving and provides state-ofthe-art solutions for them.