Translations:Glossary of Key Terms and Concepts/371/en

Monitoring the digital archive software and improving it when needed ensures that it continues to meet our requirements and avoids it becoming obsolete. However, if the monitoring shows that a software can no longer be adapted or that it is losing its support community, we will need to find a new appropriate software solution and migrate to it. Monitoring and Preservation of archival data are actions that need to be performed on the digital archival data in the maintenance phase. This is in essence a continuation of the work done as part of the preparation of the digital material for ingest, including the backup of data, checkups of file formats, validity, fixity, and quality assurance. Monitoring and preservation actions must be planned and performed regularly to check and amend any irregularities or errors. Monitoring Storage Media is necessary to timely detect any errors or damage and prevent it from becoming obsolete or outdated. Over time, storage media can become unstable and unreliable and cause data corruption or loss. A rule of thumb for a safe preservation practice is for storage media to have a short life cycle, sometimes estimated at only three to five years. This means that after this period, we will need to find and obtain a new storage media and migrate our data to it.